Andrea Bocelli receives honorary degree at Thomas Jefferson University’s 199th commencement

Thomas Jefferson University’s Class of 2023 comprises doctors, medical practitioners — and a legendary Italian tenor.

Andrea Bocelli was awarded an honorary degree at the university’s 199th commencement ceremony on Wednesday in the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall. The ceremony felicitated newly minted graduates from the Jefferson College of Life Sciences and Sidney Kimmel Medical College.

Organist Bruce Todd was setting up the organ during a sound check before the ceremony when Bocelli’s translator walked up to him and said, “Mr. Bocelli would like to hear the organ,” Todd told The Inquirer. Of course, he complied.

“You should try it,” he said to an awed Bocelli, who fervently nodded his head. “It is the largest concert hall organ in the United States. You can put that on your resumé,” Todd joked. The maestro then took to the Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ and played it for almost 10 minutes before the commencement started. “He had a good time playing the organ, and he did fine.”

“Well, you did enter in time for a pandemic, so we decided there was going to be something like nothing else has ever been for a graduation,” Mark L. Tykocinski, the university’s president, said to the graduating class before introducing Bocelli on stage.

Bocelli was born with congenital glaucoma. “As a child I spent long periods of my life in hospitals,” he said in his speech before adding that his first dream as a child was to be a doctor before the “manic passion for singing” took over his life. “That’s when I started idolizing the doctors who came to my bedside in white coats. How could I not want to imitate them?”

He transformed the commencement into a concert, singing two songs (Francesco Paolo Tosti’s “L’alba separa dalla luce l’ombra” and “La Serenata”). After being conferred the honorary doctoral degree in medical humanities and sciences, the tenor promised to never try to administer an injection or cut someone’s skin up.

“As always, receiving an award both honors and worries me, because with such testaments of esteem, one needs to be able to continuously live up to them,” Bocelli said to The Inquirer. The degree, he said, “will flank” his earlier degrees in modern linguistics and law. “Ones that took years of hard studying and sacrifices.”

For this new honorary doctor, music remains the “quintessential soothing balm,” a remedy he shares with enthusiasm in all his travels around the world. Even as he delved deep into the study of physiology of “the voice and upper airways,” Bocelli was quick to warn that his medical expertise ends there. “So I would discourage, by all means, anyone willing to offer themselves as a patient!”

In 2015, Bocelli performed in Philadelphia at the Catholic Church’s World Meeting of Families in the presence of Pope Francis. “This is my first U.S. degree, and I am particularly excited to receive it in a city that I have known and loved for so long,” he said.

For those of us who weren’t lucky enough to witness Bocelli’s performance on Wednesday, there is good news. He will be back in the city to perform at the Wells Fargo Center on Dec. 7.