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Home Reprinted by permission of the author. By COLIN DICKEY • THE BELIEVER • JANUARY 2013 In 1989 over a dozen of opera’s greatest superstars—including Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, and Birgit Nillson—added their names to a petition before the Italian government, asking them to lower the standard pitch at which all orchestras are tuned. At the time, international standard pitch was set at 440 Hz, which is to say that the A above middle C should be tuned to resonate at 440 cycles per second. The petition asked to lower this to 432 Hz, claiming that “the continual raising of pitch for orchestras provokes serious damage to singers, who are forced to adapt to different tunings from one concert hall or opera to the next,” and that “the high standard pitch is one of the main reasons for the crisis in singing, that has given rise to ‘hybrid’ voices unable to perform the ...