Grande amore: The Televote That Wasn't Enough

MAY 15 2015 · 12:15

Il Volo · "Grande amore" · Italy · 2015 Placement: 3rd · Language: Italian · Composers: Francesco Boccia, Ciro Esposito · Venue: Wiener Stadthalle · Host: Vienna, Austria · Type: upset · Broadcast: HD Il Volo — Piero Barone, Ignazio Boschetto, and Gianluca Ginoble, three young Italian tenors who had been marketed since their teens as operatic-pop heirs to the Three Tenors tradition — arrived at Eurovision 2015 as Italy's Sanremo winners that February and as pre-contest favorites in one of the most-watched editions of the contest's modern era. 'Grande amore' was an Italian-language operatic pop ballad built on a surging chorus pitched for stadium acoustics. The Vienna staging was minimalist — three men in dark suits, a single rotating camera, a gold-lit backdrop — trusting the song to carry. It did. When the votes came in, Il Volo won the televote, pulling the highest public-vote total of the contest. But the 2015 contest used the then-standard 50/50 split between national juries and televoting; the juries placed Il Volo considerably lower, giving Sweden's Måns Zelmerlöw and his 'Heroes' both the jury vote and the overall win. Russia's Polina Gagarina came second. Italy finished third despite a televote first. It was the most-discussed jury-televote split of that decade's Eurovision. Context Italy had returned to Eurovision in 2011 after a fourteen-year absence. Eurovision 2015 was staged in Vienna because Austria's Conchita Wurst had won in 2014. The 50/50 jury-televote system had been introduced in 2009 after years of televote-only voting had produced diplomatic-bloc patterns the EBU wanted to dilute. Legacy 'Grande amore' reportedly became the best-selling Eurovision song of 2015 in several European markets and launched Il Volo into an international touring schedule that continued for the rest of the decade. The 2015 result became the canonical case study used by Eurovision commentators when discussing jury-televote divergence. Mythology The televote remembers one song. The jury remembers another. When they disagree violently, the winner is decided by arithmetic and the loser becomes a grievance.