Actually, his voice as heard in the recording is the same range of pitches for both parts. It’s the TIMBRE of the voice that’s different — lighter and livelier in the first minute, heavier and sleepier in the rest — due to the changing of speeds to the recorded tracks (which were ORIGINALLY sung at different pitch ranges).
Sorry, I had that backwards — the heavy, sleepy timbre is in the first minute.
No problems, mate! It’s easy to mix them up—I do it all the time. 
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Not yet. DAWs were lightyears away. Analog synths were still there, and the recording was on the tape. First fully digital recording was “Electric cafe” by Kraftwerk in 86 IIRC. Regardless of digital instruments, if it was all recorded on analog medium it’s quite possible that some of it is a bit flat or sharp.
Most records can be played along with I guess. But I hear artificial higher and lower voices all the time on records. Maybe they are all older ones, I can’t remember them all. But I can’t imagine producers or engineers care about musicians trying to learn it.
Bop Til You Drop by Ry Cooder was the first digitally recorded album. That was in '79 or '80.
McCartney’s Tug of War (82) was also digitally recorded. I recall the DDD symbol on CD’s when they came put as well, which referred to (if memory serves) recorded—mixed—playback.
I had thought it was Rush’s Moving Pictures, released in 1981. It’s possible that it was recorded analog and simply mastered digitally (is that possible?)
But I was going to mention Rush’s “Xanadu”, from their album A Farewell to Kings. That song is ever so slightly out of tune (sharp, IIRC) with the rest of the songs on the album. I understand it was because the rented tubular bells they used on the song were slightly out of tune, so they tuned their instruments to the bells (the bells themselves were fixed-pitch and couldn’t be adjusted).
Of course, this made it maddening when playing along with the album, because we bass and guitar players would always have to retune our instruments for that one song, then tune them back for the rest of the songs. Thankfully, somebody uploaded an MP3 of the song that had been digitally pitch-corrected. I burned a copy of the original CD and replaced the original “Xanadu” with the corrected version so that I no longer had to deal with that nonsense.
This article mentions a digital master. But the Wikipedia article mentions a later remaster from an analog copy [I wonder why, though?]; that would explain the confusion.
It could be that George Michael had the Juno-60 synth out of tune and simply didn’t know it. Although he played everything on the track he didn’t actually know how to play any instruments and played the keyboards parts laboriously with only two or three fingers at a time.
His engineer Chris Porter discussed the recording a few days ago here: Still saving us from tears: the inside story of Wham!'s Last Christmas
and
What a cool article. 
Last Christmas is a great song. It’s even better knowing how it was recorded.
Gwen Stefani recently covered Last Christmas for her new holiday album and tv special.
Thank you for the link.