Plácido Domingo, born in 1941, Spanish tenor and conductor, widely regarded as having the greatest tenor voice of his time. His voice has a dark, glowing quality, with great strength at the bottom of the range. Domingo has toured major opera houses around the world performing in more than 100 different roles. He began a second career as a conductor of opera during the 1970s. Domingo published his autobiography, My First Forty Years, in 1983.

For much of his career Domingo has pursued a hectic schedule, singing 70 to 80 performances each year. The secret of his endurance lies partly in his musical intelligence and training, and partly in the natural musical ease that characterizes his singing. He learns parts quickly and needs no coach. While the highest notes do not come with complete ease, the smoothness of Domingo’s technique and his warm, golden sound are universally admired. He has a further asset as an opera performer in his physical appearance. Over six feet tall, darkly handsome, and a committed and conscientious actor, Domingo has been able to create tenor heroes who not only sound plausible but are visually compelling as well.

Early Years

Born in Madrid, Spain, Domingo moved with his family to Mexico in 1949 and began studying voice, piano, and conducting at the National Conservatory in Mexico City in 1955. His parents were both singers in zarzuela—a form of Spanish musical theater. The young Domingo appeared in his first role in 1957 as a baritone in zarzeula, not as a tenor. He sang his first baritone role with the Mexican National Opera in 1959 but was advised to become a tenor and made the switch later that year.

In 1961 in Monterrey, Mexico, he sang in his first major role, that of Alfredo in the opera La Traviata, by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. The same year Domingo appeared in the United States for the first time, with the Dallas Civic Opera in Lucia di Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti. In 1962 he married soprano Marta Ornelas, and from 1962 to 1965 the two performed with the Israeli National Opera, singing mostly in Hebrew.

International Star

Domingo’s first appearance in New York City was with the City Opera in 1966, where he sang the role of Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini. His debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, in Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, followed three years later. Thereafter, he debuted in major opera houses around the world, establishing his international reputation in several performances in the early 1970s: Vasco da Gama in L’Africaine by Giacomo Meyerbeer in San Francisco; Arrigo in Verdi’s I Vespri Siciliani in Paris and New York; and finally in the role he has made virtually his own, the title role in Verdi’s Otello. His performance in Otello was filmed by director Franco Zeffirelli in 1986, by which time Domingo had starred in several other opera motion pictures and videos.

During his career Domingo has commanded a remarkable range of roles—from the light, delicate sound of Nemorino in Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore to the fierce, dark demands of Verdi’s Otello. As his voice deepened and darkened over time, he turned in the late 1980s and the 1990s to the operas of German composer Richard Wagner, which require a more powerful tenor voice than Italian operas do. In 1992 he performed at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, where he sang the title role in Wagner’s Parsifal.

In popular music Domingo recorded Perhaps Love, an album of duets with popular American singer and songwriter John Denver in 1981. He has also made a number of recordings of popular Spanish songs, including Always in My Heart (Siempre en mi Corazón, 1983), which received one of the several Grammy Awards he has won. During the 1990s Domingo recorded bestselling Christmas albums with popular American singers Diana Ross and Dionne Warwick. In 1990 he joined Spanish tenor José Carreras and Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti in the first of the so-called Three Tenors concerts. The tenors have regrouped every four years since 1990 to sing at the World Cup soccer finals.

A busy performance and recording schedule has not prevented Domingo from taking on other responsibilities. He is noted for his charitable work, especially for raising millions of dollars to help victims of a 1985 earthquake in Mexico City. Since 1996 Domingo has served as artistic director of the Washington (D.C.) Opera, and in 2000 he undertook the additional post of artistic director of the Los Angeles Opera. In 2002 Domingo was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. That year he was also made a commander of the French Legion of Honor and awarded an honorary knighthood by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. In 2007 Domingo announced that after singing tenor roles for nearly 50 years he would fulfill a dream before retirement by taking on the demanding baritone role of Simon Boccanegra in Verdi’s opera of that name. Performances were scheduled in 2009 for Berlin’s Staatsoper, La Scala in Milan, and Covent Garden in London.