Plácido Domingo

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Plácido Domingo

Background information
Birth name José Plácido Domingo Embil
Born January 21, 1941, Madrid, Spain
Genre(s) Classical Music
Occupation(s) tenor Opera Singer
Instrument(s) Voice
Years active 1959 - present
Associated
acts		 Three Tenors

José Plácido Domingo Embil (born January 21, 1941[1]), better known as Plácido Domingo, is a world-famous Spanish operatic tenor. He is known for his versatile, strong voice that possesses a ringing and clear tone throughout its range. In addition to his singing roles, he has also taken on conducting opera performances as well as acting as the General Director of the Washington National Opera in Washington, DC and the Los Angeles Opera in California.

Contents

[edit] Biography and career

Plácido Domingo was born in Madrid, Spain, and moved to Mexico at age 8 with his family, who ran a zarzuela company. In Mexico City he studied music at the National Conservatory. He provided backup vocals for Los Black Jeans in 1958, a rock-and-roll band lead by César Costa. He learned piano and conducting, but made his stage debut in 1959 (May 12) at the Teatro Degollado in Guadalajara as Pascual in Marina. It was followed by Borsa in Rigoletto, Padre Confessor (Le dialogue des Carmelites) and others. In 1962 he joined the Israeli National Opera in Tel Aviv, where he spent two and a half years, singing 280 performances.

On September 19, 1985, the biggest earthquake in Mexico's history devastated the whole Mexican capital. Domingo's aunt, uncle, his nephew and his nephew’s young son were killed in the collapse of the Nuevo León apartment block in the Tlatelolco housing complex. Domingo himself labored to rescue survivors. During the next year, he did benefit concerts for the victims and released an album of one of the events.

[edit] Premiere performances and breadth of roles

In 1966, he sang the title role in the US premiere of Ginastera's Don Rodrigo at the New York City Opera, with much acclaim. He first performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on September 28, 1968, in Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur, singing with Renata Tebaldi. (Since then, he has opened the season there 21 times, surpassing the previous record of Enrico Caruso by four.) He made his debut at the Vienna State Opera in 1967, at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1968, at both La Scala and San Francisco Opera in 1969, and at Covent Garden in 1971, and has now sung at practically every other important opera house and festival worldwide.

Perhaps the most versatile of all living tenors, Domingo has sung 92 roles onstage to date (and as many as 123 roles when also counting recorded roles), ranging from Mozart to Ginastera. His main repertoire however is Italian (Otello, Il Trovatore, Don Carlo), French (Faust, Werther, Don José in Carmen, Samson in Samson et Dalila), and German (Lohengrin, Parsifal, and Siegmund in Die Walküre). He continues to add more operas to his repertoire, such as recently Franco Alfano's Cyrano de Bergerac at the Metropolitan Opera and the Royal Opera House in London.

[edit] Other achievements

  • In 1981 Domingo gained considerable recognition outside of the opera world when he recorded the song "Perhaps Love" as a duet with the late American country/folk music singer John Denver. In 1987, he and Denver joined Julie Andrews for an Emmy Award winning holiday television special, The Sound of Christmas, filmed in Salzburg, Austria.
  • In 1993 he also founded Operalia, an important international competition for young opera singers.

[edit] Three Tenors

Giving him even greater international recognition outside of the world of opera, with José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti, he participated in The Three Tenors concert at the opening of the 1990 World Cup in Rome. The event was originally conceived to raise money for the José Carreras International Leukemia Foundation and was later repeated a number of times, including at the three subsequent World Cup finals (1994 in Los Angeles, 1998 in Paris, and 2002 in Yokohama). Alone, Domingo again made an appearance at the final of the 2006 World Cup in Berlin.

[edit] Performances on film

Domingo has appeared in six opera films: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's Madama Butterfly, Francesco Rosi's Carmen (Grammy Awarded), Gianfranco de Bosio's Tosca as well as Franco Zeffirelli's Otello, Cavalleria rusticana & Pagliacci, and La Traviata (with Teresa Stratas, which received a Grammy Award), and also in numerous operatic videos. He has appeared on television, both in zarzuela evenings, and Live at the Met telecasts and broadcasts.

[edit] Recordings

He has made well over 100 recordings, most of which are full-length operas, often recording the same role more than once. Among these recordings is a boxed set of every tenor aria Verdi ever wrote, including several rarely-performed versions, in different languages from the original operas, which Verdi wrote for specific performances.

In August 2005, EMI Classics released a new studio recording of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in which Domingo sings the title role of Tristan. A review of this recording, headlined "Vocal perfections", that appeared in the August 8, 2005 issue of The Economist begins with the word "Monumental" and ends with the words, "a musical lyricism and a sexual passion that make the cost and the effort entirely worthwhile". It characterized his July 2005 performance of Siegmund in Wagner's Die Walküre at Covent Garden as "unforgettable" and "luminous". The review also remarks that Domingo is still taking on roles that he has not previously performed.

New recordings that have been released in the first half of 2006 include studio recordings of Puccini's Edgar, Isaac Albéniz's Pepita Jiménez, as well as a selection of Italian and Neapolitan songs, titled Italia ti amo (all three with Deutsche Grammophon).

Amongst many television appearance in many countries over the years (a large number for charitable purposes), Domingo appeared as the star act in the New Orleans Opera Company's A Night For New Orleans with Frederica von Stade in March 2006. The concert was to raise funds for the rebuilding of the city and was well received by the audience

[edit] Honors and awards

Domingo has received numerous honors, including:

Since 1993, he also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

[edit] Trivia

  • A false rumour circulating on the Internet states that he used to be enemy with José Carreras, and that in spite of that he created a Hermosa Foundation to help Carreras in his treatments against leukemia, because humankind could not afford to lose such a voice.
  • Domingo lost relatives in the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake. He spent several days in the ruins of the collapsed Tlatelolco housing development collaborating with rescue personnel. His efforts were instrumental at the time to bring even more visibility to the plight of Mexicans who had suffered the effects of the disaster.
  • Domingo appeared on The Cosby Show Season 5 as Alberto Santiago, a colleague of Dr Cliff Huxtable.
  • Voiced the operatic moon that sang in the 2001 film Moulin Rouge!
  • The opera singing muppet tenor on Sesame Street named Plácido Flamingo is named in his honor.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ His birthdate has sometimes incorrectly been given as 1934. This arose from a comment by Giacomo Lauri-Volpi in 1971 who on hearing him in La forza del destino said that "no one could sing Alvaro like that at 30 years old." This was shown by the author Daniel Snowman to be an erroneous assumption on obtaining Domingo's birth certificate from the Madrid authorities. (see Plácido Domingo - My Operatic Roles, Helena Matheopoulos)

[edit] External links

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