Plácido Domingo: singer, conductor and administrator. By now he has sung 121 different roles, more than any other tenor in the annals of music, with more new roles planned for future seasons. His repertoire spans the gamut from Mozart to Verdi, from Berlioz to Puccini, from Wagner to Ginastera. He sings in every important opera house in the world and has made well over 100 recordings, of which 97 are full-length operas, often recording the same role more than once, and for which he has earned nine Grammys and two Grammys in the newly established Latin Division.

He has made more than fifty videos and three theatrically released films – Franco Zeffirelli's La traviata and Otello and Francesco Rosi's Carmen. His telecast of Tosca from the authentic settings in Rome was seen by more than one billion people in 117 different countries. When he opened the 1999-2000 Metropolitan Opera's season with Pagliacci, he sang his 18th opening night of a season, surpassing the old Caruso record of 17 opening nights. As a conductor, he has led opera performances in all the important theaters, from the Metropolitan to London's Covent Garden and the Vienna State Opera, and has conducted purely symphonic concerts with such renowned orchestras as the Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony and the Chicago Symphony, while also making recordings as a conductor.

As administrator, he was the music director of the Seville World's Fair and in this capacity invited the world's foremost orchestras and opera companies, including the Metropolitan Opera, to Seville. He is today the general director of both the Washington National Opera and the Los Angeles Opera. Both companies enjoy today special artistic acclaim and financial stability.

Born in Madrid to parents who were zarzuela performers, Plácido Domingo moved to Mexico at the age of eight. He went to the Mexico City Conservatory to study piano and conducting, but eventually was sidetracked into vocal training after his voice was discovered. He made his operatic debut at Monterrey as Alfredo in La traviata and then spent two and a half years with the Israel National Opera, singing 280 performances of 12 different roles. In 1966, he created the title role in the United States premiere of Ginastera's Don Rodrigo at the New York City Opera, while appearing there in standard repertory as well. His Metropolitan Opera debut came in 1968, as Maurizio in Adriana Lecouvreur. He has subsequently apperaed there in more than 400 performances of 41 different roles and is now in his 36th consecutive season with the company (/2005). He appears regularly at all the big opera houses, including Milan's La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, London's Covent Garden, Paris' Bastille Opera the San Francisco Opera, Chicago's Lyric Opera, the Washington National Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, the Liceu in Barcelona, the Colon in Buenos Aires, the Real in Madrid and at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals.

Domingo's recordings, whether complete operas, aria or duet albums or cross-over material, inevitably appear on the best-seller charts and at one time, not long ago, seven of his CDs appeared simultaneously on Billboard's top-selling charts of classical and cross-over recordings. Eight of his records have gone gold, meaning they have sold well over one million copies. Two of his most recent recording projects have been a double CD of every aria Verdi wrote for the tenor voice and a CD of excerpts from Wagner's Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, which includes most of the music written for the Heldentenor part of Siegfried.

His repertoire (121 different roles, as mentioned earlier), includes almost all important parts in Italian and French operas. Being constantly challenged by new roles, his ever expanding foray into the German repertoire consists of Wagner's Parsifal, Lohengrin and Siegmund in Die Walküre, in addition to recorded performances of Die Meistersinger, Tannhäuser and Der fliegende Holländer, of Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, of Weber's Oberon and of Beethoven's Fidelio, which was recently released. Within the past four years, he added to his stage performances his first role in Russian, Gherman in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, as well as the Spanish opera Margarita la Tornera by Roberto Chapi and Verdi's La Battaglia di Legnano. Unlike many of his colleagues, he is also interested in broadening his repertory with new compositions, such as Anton Garcia Abril's Divinas Palabras and Deborah Drattell's Nicholas and Alexandra in which he played the role of Rasputin (his 120th role). Also new for him in his recorded repertoire are two Spanish operas, Breton's La Dolores and Albeniz's Merlin, for which he won a Latin Grammy.

Highlights of the -2005 season included singing for the first time Alfano's Cyrano de Bergerac at the Metropolitan (his 121st role), where he also performed Siegmund in Die Walküre and conducted Carmen. The season also included Walküre also at the Chicago Lyric and at London's Covent Garden; Parsifal at the Liceu in Barcelona, in Berlin and in Vienna; The Queen of Spades at La Scala; Idomeneo at the Los Angeles Opera; and Luisa Fernanda at the Washington National Opera, where he also conducted Andrea Chenier. He sings concerts in San Diego, Fresno, Biloxi, Tokyo, Fukuoka and Parma, and, by recording the complete Tristan und Isolde, adds the 122nd role to his repertoire.

Domingo's interest in helping young singers has led to his yearly competition Operalia, which so far has taken place in Paris (twice), Mexico City, Madrid, Bordeaux, Tokyo, Hamburg, Puerto Rico, Los Angeles (twice), Washington and a combination of Switzerland (St. Gallen), Austria (Bregenz) and Germany (Friedrichshafen). It is the biggest on the international scene with annual prizes amounting close to $200,000. It has launched many singers to international recognition, not only thorugh its prizes, but because of DOmingo's continued interest in furthering their careers. March 2002 also saw the inauguration of the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Program of the Washington National Opera, another of his efforts to pave the way for opera's future stars, a topic which formed the nucleus of a recent "60 Minutes" segment on him.

Plácido Domingo has raised millions of dollars through special benefit concerts in order to help such causes as the victims of the 1985 Mexican earthquake, AIDS and the victims of such other disasters as the Armenian earthquake, the mudslides of Acapulco, etc. He is one of the most decorated and honored artists before the public today, most recently being named one of the Kennedy Center Honorees (in December 2000) and, in 2002, the recipient of France's Legion of Honor, a decoration given very rarely to a non-French citizen; of the Honorary Knighthood of the British Empire; and of the highest decoration in the United States, the Medal of Freedom. In July 2003, he recieved an honorary doctorate from England's Oxford University and, shortly thereafter, was given President Gorbachev's World Award for Humanitarian Causes.

The accolades most often associated with him are "King of Opera," which was originally the banner headline on the cover of Newsweek magazine and "a true renaissance man in music," which was first printed in Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper. London's newspaper The Guardian summed it all up recently (July 4, 2003) by simply naming Plácido Domingo "the greatest operatic artist of modern times."