Fall of the supreme professional who reached the highest levels of his art
It’s impossible to think of an opera singer who enjoyed a longer or steadier career at the highest artistic level than the Spanish tenor Placido Domingo – a status that will make his fall from grace under the Metoo movement all the harder.
Pavarotti and Caruso may have had “a common touch” that brought them more dazzling celebrity outside the world of classical music – and it could be argued they were both naturally blessed with more beautiful, radiant and distinctive voices than Domingo’s. But neither could match his versatility, musicality, intelligence, presence or sheer night-after-night, year-in, year-out stamina and consistency.
Until the recent revelations, Domingo had been considered the supreme professional, with a warm and easy-going temperament. Tantrums were not his style and he rarely cancelled a contracted engagement.
His willingness to traverse continents for a single performance earned him a reputation for uncanny ubiquity.
The statistics of his performing life are staggering: from a repertory which included more than 130 roles, he made over 100 full-length recordings and 60 filmed performances. Only the 1985 Mexican earthquake caused his relentless schedule to falter: it was a catastrophe in which he lost many relatives and friends, and his subsequent visits to Mexico City in an effort to raise funds for the victims left him with a coating of fine dust in his throat which caused him a year of vocal problems. Domingo’s public popularity extended beyond the opera world, particularly in Hispanic countries, where he made a speciality of performing tango and romantic ballads. In 1981 he made a bestselling album with John Denver, and in 1990 he joined forces in Rome with Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras for the legendary Three Tenors’ concert, staged for the World Cup.
As his voice mellowed and aged, he adjusted his repertory accordingly – and he wasn’t above transposing some awkwardly high passages down into his comfort zone. Gradually he abandoned tenor repertory altogether for baritone roles – a move that generally displeased the cognoscenti and disappointed those who had known him in his prime.
He also developed a busy career as an opera conductor – although many critics found his interpretations routine – and as an administrator: simultaneously to his long stint as artistic director of Los Angeles Opera, he led a smaller opera company in Washington DC and at one point was rumoured to have applied for the biggest job in the opera world, running the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In the process, he collected an enormous number of awards – in Britain, he was given the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal, an honorary knighthood, and an honorary doctorate from Oxford.
In 2009, he became the first recipient of a million-dollar prize endowed by Birgit Nilsson, the Swedish dramatic soprano.
It was music’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
And he continues to manage a schedule of high-profile performances – though it remains to be seen now how long that will last.