However, Domingo made amends to the operatic gods a year later when he was plucked out of a New York rehearsal to fly across country to save the San Francisco Opera's opening-night Otello after Carlo Cossutta woke up voiceless 11 hours before curtain time. Domingo left, wig in hand, on a helicopter to New Jersey, where a private jet was waiting. Radar reports monitored his cross-continental progress, including a refueling in Nebraska. Illness isn't always the problem. Lyric Opera of Chicago replaced a key singer for William Bolcom's A View From the Bridge because she was to play a sexually untouched girl, and soprano Juliana Rambaldi's pregnancy was just too obvious.
Singers do fake - or at least they used to.
During the 1980s, some European singers said yes to everything and just waited to see what country's currency was the highest when rehearsal time rolled around, went there, and canceled the rest. Funny how opera casts seemed to stabilize after that.