On July 7, 1990, at the ancient Baths of Caracalla in Rome on the eve of the FIFA World Cup final, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras stood shoulder to shoulder and accidentally broke the music industry. This episode traces how a concert conceived by producers Mario Dradi, Elmar Kruse and Herbert Chappell to welcome Carreras back from leukemia treatment and raise funds for his foundation produced the best-selling classical album of all time, and how that one night mutated into a global stadium franchise.

We look at the 1994 Dodger Stadium sequel watched by an estimated 1.3 billion viewers, the acoustic engineering of delay towers and earpieces needed to make unamplified opera voices work in a concrete bowl, and concerts at Wembley, Giants Stadium, the Eiffel Tower and Beijing’s Forbidden City. The conversation then turns to the money: flat fees that left the tenors with no royalties from the 1990 album, Domingo’s suspicion of a secret Pavarotti payout later described in Herbert Breslin’s book, million-dollar concert fees, an FTC antitrust case against the record labels for price fixing, German tax settlements, and a promoter sent to jail.

• Why Nessun Dorma became the unofficial anthem of the World Cup
• The purist backlash from critics like Martin Bernheimer and Domingo’s blunt reply
• How the trio evolved from naive artists into shrewd negotiators after 1994
• Parodies on Animaniacs, Celebrity Deathmatch and Seinfeld’s forgotten other guy
• The final 2003 performance in Columbus, Ohio and the canceled 2005 reunion