Placido Domingo is one of the world's most renowned tenors. An opera conductor, administrator, and singer, he has appeared in almost 200 roles, more than any other tenor in history of music. He plays music from the eras of Mozart to Verdi, Berlioz to Puccini, Wagner to Ginastera, and Spanish to Neapolitan.
Domingo was born in Madrid, Spain in 1941 to parents who were zarzuela performers. They moved to Mexico when he was only 8 years old. He studied voice, piano and conducting at the Mexico City Conservatory and made his debut at Monterrey as Alfredo in La traviata. He also spent nearly three years with the Israel National Opera.
Domingo has sung and continues to sing at all major opera houses of the world. In the last thirty-one years he has opened at the Metropolitan Opera 18 times, which has only been matched by the famous singer Caruso. In 2001 and 2002 he sang at the opening night of a Verdi gala, performed in the lead role in Mozart's Idomeneo, the premiere of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari Sly, and Rigoletto.
To this day, Domingo has been in over 400 performances in almost 40 different roles. He performs repeatedly at La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, London's Covent Garden, the Opera de la Bastille in Paris, the San Francisco Opera, Chicago's Lyric Opera, the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, and at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals.
Domingo never turns down a new role, taking up Italian, French, and German, including Wagner's Parsifal and Lohengrin, and Siegmund in Die Walkure. His more recent roles include the tenor in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, Meyerbeer's Le Prophete, and also Britten's Peter Grimes.
Domingo was the first classical artist to perform a solo in New York's Central Park, with an audience of over 400,000 people, even in bad weather. Domingo is also known for collaborating and touring with tenors Jose Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti all over the world.
Placido Domingo has won 8 Grammys to date for his recordings. In one instance, seven of his albums were on the Billboards top-selling charts at one time. Eight of his albums sold over one million copies and went gold. He has a few theatrically released films, including Zeffirelli's La traviata, Otello, and Rosi's Carmen. Also, over one billion people in almost 120 countries saw his telecast of Tosca worldwide. He also has well over fifty videos accompanying his recordings.
Domingo has funded millions of dollars through his special benefits concerts to the victims of the 1985 earthquake in Mexico, the AIDS foundation, and victims of the Armenian earthquake and mudslides of Acapulco.
