Proms Guide

I'm not quite in Proms-thinking mode yet: before they start I've got Rigoletto, Die Walküre, trip to Mother's, and Rigoletto; and before I heave my sorry arse down to SW7 there's an additional Die Walküre and a Mitridate at ROH.

But it's pretty close now, the Proms season. The Times has a Proms Handbook, which is interesting rather than useful - a guide to eating and drinking, which misses out my favourite and somewhere I have been recommeded by a trusted source (my boss) and some musical jokes, which is far from comprehensive containing, as it does, only one Beecham-ism.

An article on how diverse the programme has become in latter years and on the Blue Peter Prom, which I am wholly convinced is a jolly good thing, having had an excited review presented to me last year by the then five-year-old daughter of a friend.

Also a feature on Plácido, who's making his Proms debut two weeks today (and I shall copy-and-paste below, because of the difficulty in accessing archived Times articles)

Plácido Domingo

By Robert Thicknesse

The tenor should be judged by his 'real' work

He always used to say he would give up singing at 65, so the Proms have got him just in time. Well, maybe. Now that he is 64 and a half, Plácido Domingo, still one of the world’s greatest tenors, is not being quite so insistent about retirement. But who will complain if he sticks around? As the Proms audience will find out when Domingo makes his tardy debut there on July 18, singing the role of Siegmund in a concert performance of Covent Garden’s Die Walküre (which he also sings on stage at the Royal Opera three times from July 8 to 15), this is a voice that has lost little of its force, passion or lustre.

True, not everyone buys Domingo in Wagner. His voice has always had an inescapably Spanish intensity, absolutely suited to the monomaniacal dramatic tenor roles in Verdi and Puccini. Some of his earlier excursions into Wagner suffered from somewhat peculiar pronunciation and phrasing. But Domingo started life as a baritone, and the Heldentenor of Wagner is precisely that, a baritone with extra notes on top, whose effortful production (Domingo has always had to reach for the top notes) is inextricably part of the required sound.

He was born in Madrid on January 21, 1941. His parents moved to Mexico when Domingo was five, leaving him in the care of the extended family; at the age of eight he joined them in Mexico. His first stage appearances were with his parents’ zarzuela company: among other things, he sang in the Spanish-language premiere of My Fair Lady. In 1959 the Mexican National Opera took him on as a tenor; in 1961 he made his American debut; and in 1962 he married the soprano Marta Ornelas and moved with her to Tel Aviv, where they were engaged by Hebrew National Opera.

Marta is his second wife — there was a secret marriage to his childhood sweetheart, which quickly collapsed — and she has been a forceful presence in Domingo’s life and career, giving up her own to look after her husband and family. Domingo is highly courtly and uxorious towards her, despite (or because of) the abounding stories of affairs. There was talk linking Domingo with a young Romanian music student, then a crush on a soprano. Monica Lewinsky’s mother, Marcia Lewis, made coy hints in a rubbishy book she wrote about Domingo, Pavarotti and Carreras’s private lives.

But Marta is a formidable character, who directs operas with an intellectual rigour that excites varying degrees of critical acclaim. She works mostly in Washington and LA, where her husband is involved in the running of the resident opera companies. This has led to mutterings about the Domingo “family business”.

Following his debut at the New York Met in 1968, Domingo’s career began to go stratospheric. He made his Covent Garden debut in 1969 in the role of Cavaradossi in Tosca, the part which is generally agreed (with Verdi’s Otello) to be his signature and whose combination of muscle and tenderness is the blueprint for his voice.

By the mid-1970s he was unarguably one of the world’s greatest tenors, his voice combined with louring romantic looks and a magnetic stage presence. Operatic “acting” is often a substitute for singing: not with Domingo, who knows that drama is created entirely through the voice, but also knows the trick of intensifying the effect with his centred and dignified thespian skills.

He would probably rather forget his collaboration with John Denver on the album Perhaps Love in 1981, one of the first examples of cross-over. Among other collectors’ gems, this contained the most eccentrically pronounced versions of Annie’s Song and Yesterday on record, and the title song is a memorably cheesy duet with Denver.

If the world didn’t already know about this tall, good-looking, charming caballero, they certainly did when he appeared with Pavarotti and Carreras for the first time as The Three Tenors at the Italia ’90 World Cup. The repeat performance four years later was watched by 1.3 billion people on television. This remarkable eruption into public consciousness of operatic music — or at least of three minutes from Turandot — had interesting consequences: one wonders for example if Classic FM (founded in 1992) would have existed without it. There is plenty of fastidious distaste expressed at the phenomenon of crossover and the prostitution of talent, but this original version still has a kind of innocence: these are at least proper voices, and they sing the sort of end-of-the-pier stuff that tenors have been wowing crowds with for years. And Domingo always goes back to the real opera stage, unlike some.

He has always been fiercely busy. His 46-year career has featured 121 different roles and more than 3,000 performances; his parallel career as a conductor began in 1973 with La traviata at New York City Opera and culminated in two performances on the same day (one conducting and one singing) of Pagliacci at Covent Garden in 2003. He has always said that he started conducting in order to have something to do when his voice gave out, and his efforts on the podium are characteristically conscientious.

Domingo has taken some stick for his “greed” in continuing to milk the Three Tenors franchise, but the money earned has gone to good causes: he helped to raise millions for the relief of victims of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, in which he lost four relatives, and he paid $2 million in pledges to Los Angeles Opera and Washington Opera — he is the artistic director of both — unfulfilled by Alberto Vilar when he fell on hard times. What is undoubtedly true is that Domingo is a cash cow for opera houses — Covent Garden hoicked up tickets to £160 for the hour-long Pagliacci. “If they cash in on me, it isn’t because of my fee,” he says.

He will be appearing at Covent Garden again next May in Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac — another feature of Domingo’s recent career is his resurrection of (sometimes justly) forgotten operas.

There remains one unfulfilled ambition: Domingo has said for many years that when his top notes give out, he will return to being a baritone, mostly in order to sing the title role in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, the tortured hero to end them all. And we would all grant him a few more years of vocal life to hear that happen.

# Plácido Domingo sings the role of Siegmund in a concert performance of Die Walküre at the Proms on July 18