Louise T. Guinther

Happy birthday to Plácido Domingo, the man whose clarion voice and no-holds-barred performance style jump-started my lifelong opera obsession.

Quantitatively, Domingo is almost certainly the greatest tenor of all time. He launched his operatic career in 1959 at the age of eighteen, with an audition for the National Opera of Mexico, and is still going strong at eighty-three. He has sung more than 150 roles, from the Baroque (Bajazet in Handel’s Tamerlano) to the Classical (Mozart’s Idomeneo) to most of the great tenor roles of Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, Massenet, etc., as well as forays into less familiar territory (Russian roles including Tchaikovsky’s Lenski and Gherman; Franco Alfano’s Cyrano, Ruperto Chapi’s Margerita la Tornera, new works by Gian Carlo Menotti, Pablo Neruda, Tan Dun, Alberto Ginastera and others). Just scratching the surface of Domingo’s accomplishments is a Herculean task.

Domingo has sung with most of the great artists of the last half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first. His leading ladies have included Renata Tebaldi, Joan Sutherland, Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price, Montserrat Caballé, Martina Arroyo, Renata Scotto, Mirella Freni, Kathleen Battle, Sondra Radvanovsky and Ana María Martínez. He has recorded and performed with such renowned maestros as Leonard Bernstein, Julius Rudel, Carlos Kleiber, James Levine, Georg Solti, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti and Daniel Barenboim. He has sung at every significant opera house in the world.

But numbers are only a small part of the story. It is Domingo’s consummate artistry, voracious musical curiosity and unflagging passion for the art form that truly define his greatness. His feeling for the inherent drama in the music, his ability to color his sound to suit the character’s emotion, his natural instinct for phrasing, his sense of how his own vocal line fits into and stands out from the orchestration are unique. Above all, the way he abandons himself to the music and allows it to carry him on a resistless wave of passion defines the way opera was meant to appeal to our hearts and souls.

It would be absurd to try to represent in a few brief excerpts his kaleidoscopic vocal, stylistic and dramatic range, so I will only append two Shakespearean moments —the ultra-romantic wedding-night duet “Nuit d’hymenée,” from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, and the heartbreaking “Dio mi potevi,” sung by Verdi’s Otello after Iago persuades him that his beloved Desdemona is unfaithful—to give you a taste of his infinite variety.