Don’t ask Plácido Domingo to name his favorite role to sing. The world’s most famous tenor will say it’s like a large Italian family—you can’t possibly name your preferred child.
“Instead, I would say there are 10 or 12 roles that are very special to me because they brought great results,” says Domingo, who serves as the general director of the Washington National Opera (WNO). He adored playing everyone from Othello and Hoffman to Don José and Parsifal, but says he tries to “like what I am doing in that moment and to be sure I dedicate everything I have for the role that day.”
Since 1996, when Domingo became artistic director of the WNO, Washington-area opera fans have been well aware of the dedication and passion he brings to any role, be it performer, conductor or the opera company’s majordomo. For his part, Domingo says, “I am very proud of the great team we have. Even now, in these difficult economic times, we are doing things that we’re very proud of artistically.”
For the past nine years, D.C. opera fans have been treated to the likes of Renee Fleming and Juan Diego Florez. Diana Damrau will soon be coming to town to do Hamlet. In addition to these well-established stars—whom Domingo calls “artists who fill the house”—the Washington National Opera often introduces new talent.
Domingo attributes the discovery of talent to two initiatives, the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists program and the Plácido Domingo Operalia, an international competition first held in Paris in 1993.
“Anna Netrebko, before going to the Metropolitan Opera and becoming a great star, was singing in Washington in our productions,” says Domingo like a proud mentor. “She sang with me in Rigoletto and as Susanna in La Nozze de Figaro before doing Massenet’s Manon with the Los Angeles Opera,” a company that the peripatetic Domingo now directs.
“When you are discovering singers and you give them their first chance, it is wonderful, and you are so proud. And that’s something for which the Washington National Opera has really been important,” says Domingo.
Born in Spain and raised in Mexico, Domingo is passionate about expanding the audience for grand opera. Throughout his long career, which began when he debuted in Rigoletto with the Mexican National Opera in 1960 at age 18, and at the Metropolitan in 1968, the same year as the Met debut of a young Italian tenor named Luciano Pavarotti, Domingo has loved to introduce audiences to opera, especially young people.
“For several years we have been doing what we call a Look-In,” says Domingo, “an hour during which we explain to children not just the opera’s highlights, but also how everything will be done on the stage. For example, if the opera has a storm, we explain to the children which instruments make the storm, or we show how to change the lights, or we explain the instruments, and then we invite some of the children to come and try to conduct a little beat. So young audiences have an opportunity to come and discover for themselves the world of opera.”
Domingo laments the high price of tickets. “Opera is, you could say, the greatest show on earth because everything is happening [in the production]. What’s strange is that the big-name performers [don’t have the highest price tag] because those big names sell the house. But there are a thousand things you don’t see that make opera tremendously expensive.”
Domingo’s outreach includes different—and nontraditional—venues. The WNO has simulcast Porgy and Bess, Madame Butterfly and La Boheme. And the venues—including the National Mall for La Traviata and Nationals Park for The Barber of Seville—have been unabashedly daring and fun.
Domingo is still singing the praises of the Nationals Park presentation, dubbed “Opera in the Outfield.” “It was so beautiful: 20,000 people concentrating in total silence, even with the children playing in center field and in left field, and with our beautiful sound and the vision on the gigantic screen that gives the score in the baseball stadium. When we staged La Boheme two years ago, we simulcast it to universities and colleges, and that was wonderful because it was going directly to young students who may not have had a chance to connect with opera in the past.”
The next step for opera promotion? Make it rock. “My dream is that we can create new opera houses that are bigger—4,000 seats—with perfect acoustics and sight lines. Tickets will be cheaper, and more people will come.”
In the meantime, Domingo, who turns 69 in January, will continue to dream—and sing. Although a schedule conflict has kept him off the 2009–2010 WNO lineup, next season he will sing the role of Oreste in Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride.
Domingo is also in demand as a conductor, an activity that has taken him all over the globe. Asked if he’s ever tempted, while conducting, to rush out on stage and sing the role himself, the great maestro emphatically denies any desire. “When I am conducting, I never think about wanting to sing,” he says. “And when I’m singing, I don’t want to conduct. There’s a right time for both. And, of course, when I’m conducting, I’m all for the singers. I just want to please them and I just want to help them as much as I can.”
It has been written that Domingo has played more roles than any other performer in opera history—and has 30 of them committed to memory. The ever-modest Domingo attributes this total to the simple fact that he has continued to sing at an age when most tenors have, or should have, stopped performing.
“I am still an active singer,” he says. “I never thought I would still be singing.” Then, perhaps anticipating a follow-up question about retirement, he laughs and adds, “I do not wish to sing one day longer than I should, but also not one day less than I could.”