Plácido Domingo: singer, conductor and administrator. By now he has sung 124 different roles, more than any other tenor in the annals of music, with at least two new roles planned in the next three 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 an unparalleled amount of recordings, of which 101 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. By now he has opened the Met season a record-setting 21 different times, having by-passed in 1999 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 Los Angeles Opera and the Washington National 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 appeared there in more than 400 performances of 42 different roles and the 2007/08 season will be his 39th consecutive season with the company. 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. Four of his most recent recording projects have been a double CD of every aria Verdi wrote for the tenor voice, a CD of excerpts from Wagner's Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, which includes most of the music written for the Heldentenor part of Siegfried, and two complete Wagner operas, the first a complete Tristan und Isolde with soprano Nina Stemme and Anthony Pappano conducting the Covent Garden Orchestra, and the second a complete Parsifal with Waltraud Meier and Christian Thielemann conducting the orchestra of the Vienna Staatsoper. In a less Verdian or Wagnerian mood, there have also been Puccini’s early opera Edgar and a CD devoted mostly to Neapolitan songs, under the title “Italia Ti Amo.”

His repertoire (124 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, Der fliegende Holländer and the afore-mentioned Tristan und Isolde, of Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten, of Weber's Oberon and of Beethoven's Fidelio. Within the past four years, he added to his stage performances his first role in Russian, Gherman in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, the Spanish opera Margarita la Tornera by Roberto Chapi, Verdi's La Battaglia di Legnano and Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac. 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 with him as Rasputin. 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.

Domingo’s interest in helping young singers has led to his yearly competition Operalia, which so far has taken place in Paris (twice), Valencia, Mexico City, Madrid (twice), Bordeaux, Tokyo, Hamburg, Puerto Rico, Los Angeles (twice), Washington and a combination of Switzerland (St. Gallen), Austria (Bregenz) and Germany (Friedrichshafen). Paris once again plays host to Operalia in June of 2007. It remains the biggest on the international scene with annual prizes amounting close to $200,000. It has launched many singers to international recognition, not only through its prizes, but because of Domingo's continued interest in furthering their careers. The past four years also saw the inauguration of the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artists Program of the Washington National Opera and the Domingo-Thornton Young Artists Program of the Los Angeles Opera – other examples 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.

Highlights of the 2006-2007 season included inaugurating the new Segerstrom Concert Hall in California’s Orange County by singing the world premiere of a new song-cycle by William Bolcom, composed to Garcia Lorca poems; creating another world premiere by singing the title role in Tan Dun’s The First Emperor at the Metropolitan Opera (his 124th role); singing Siegmund in Die Walküre in the new Ring cycle staging by Francesca Zambello at the Washington National Opera; singing Act I Die Walküre galas at the Munich and Hamburg Operas; the zarzuela Luisa Fernanda at the Los Angeles Opera; and Cyrano de Bergerac at Spain’s new Valencia Opera House. Also during the season he conducted Manon at the Los Angeles Opera; La Bohème at the Metropolitan; Madama Butterfly at the Washington National Opera; Tosca at the Vienna Staatsoper; and he continued to sing concerts throughout the world, from Santiago to Zurich and from Miami to Dublin.

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. Within the past few years he has become one of the most decorated and honored artists before the public today, being named one of the Kennedy Center Honorees; Commander of France’s Legion of Honor, a decoration given very rarely to a non-French citizen; the recipient of the Honorary Knighthood of the British Empire; and of the highest decoration in the United States, the Medal of Freedom. Most recently he received an honorary doctorate from England's Oxford University, was given President Gorbachev's World Award for Humanitarian Causes and was chosen for an award by Opera News magazine for the inauguration of its first annual awards.

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 by simply naming Plácido Domingo "the greatest operatic artist of modern times."