Three of the leading singers in this production, Mirella Freni, Luciano Pavarotti, and Nicolai Ghiaurov, sang the same roles in Decca/London Records' 1973 recording of the opera.
Mirella Freni and Luciano Pavarotti, coincidentally, were both born in 1935 in Modena, Italy. Their mothers worked together, but they followed very different paths to the top of their careers. Freni's aunt was a famous soprano in the 40s, Valentina Bartolomassi, and Freni grew up in a world of music (she was singing operatic arias at age ten on the radio in Italy). In contrast, though Pavarotti's family was musically talented (his father sounded eerily like him in an early recording), he was encouraged to pursue an athletic career as a soccer player and coach.