page_title: Plácido Domingo
section_title: Changing repertoire
hierarchical_section_title: Plácido Domingo / Career / Since 1990 / Changing repertoire
caption_attribution_description: English: In 1994, Placido Domingo, then the Los Angeles artistic director and noted tenor opera singer, poses in a photograph with American opera star (bass baritone) and actor/activist Stacey Robinson (right). The occasion was the opening night party of the Houston Grand Opera's production of George Gershwin's Porgy &amp; Bess in Los Angeles, California. (Courtesy of photographer Mary Biggs; modifications (cropping, tone) by Tom Sulcer. Exact date is approximate.)
context_page_description: José Plácido Domingo Embil KBE is a Spanish opera singer, conductor and arts administrator. He has recorded over a hundred complete operas and is well known for his versatility, regularly performing in Italian, French, German, Spanish, English and Russian in the most prestigious opera houses in the world. Although primarily a lirico-spinto tenor for most of his career, especially popular for his Cavaradossi, Hoffmann, Don José, and Canio, he quickly moved into more dramatic roles, becoming the most acclaimed Otello of his generation. In the early 2010s, he transitioned from the tenor repertory into almost exclusively baritone parts, most notably Simon Boccanegra. He has performed 151 different roles.
  Domingo has also achieved significant success as a crossover artist, especially in the genres of Latin and popular music. In addition to winning fourteen Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards, several of his records have gone silver, gold, platinum and multi-platinum. His first pop album, Perhaps Love, spread his fame beyond the opera world.
context_section_description: Since the 1990s Domingo has continued adding new roles to his growing repertoire, while dropping earlier parts. The 1990s were the start of rapid change in the types of roles the tenor performed. During this decade he sang his last Cavaradossi, Don Carlo, Don José, Gustavo/Riccardo, Hoffmann, and Alvaro, among others, and he began instead to expand the breadth of his roles more substantially beyond the standard Italian and French repertory. In particular, he increased his involvement in Wagnerian operas. Although he had already sung Lohengrin and recorded a few operas by the composer, he did not perform any of Wagner's works frequently onstage until he debuted as Parsifal in 1991 and Siegmund in 1992. He continued to sing these roles for almost two decades, including at the Bayreuth Festival.
  For the first time in over three decades, Domingo debuted in a Mozart opera, Idomeneo, in 1994 at the Met. During the nineties, he also appeared in the early Verdi opera, Stiffelio, the Brazilian Il Guarany, and the French grand operas, Hérodiade and Le prophète, all of which are rarely performed. Toward the end of the decade, he added his first Russian-language opera, Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades (although he had performed Eugene Onegin in translation while in Israel early in his career).
  In the 2000s, he sang his last performances of some of the most successful operas from early in his career: Andrea Chénier, Samson et Dalila, Otello, La fanciulla del West, Fedora, Pagliacci, and Adriana Lecouvreur. In the twenty-first century, however, he has focused mostly on new roles. Early in the 2000s he sang the role of Arrigo in two concert performances of Verdi's rare La battaglia di Legnano and debuted in Wolf-Ferrari's Sly, an opera that his Three Tenors colleague José Carreras had recently revived from obscurity. Domingo himself worked to popularize Franco Alfano's infrequently performed Cyrano de Bergerac a few years later. Shifting musical styles again, he appeared in the eighteenth-century operas Iphigénie en Tauride and Tamerlano late in the decade.
  Additionally, Domingo created several new roles in modern operas, such as the title role in Tan Dun's 2006 opera The First Emperor at the Metropolitan Opera, which was broadcast worldwide into movie theaters as part of the Met Live in HD series.  In September 2010, he created the role of the poet Pablo Neruda in the world première of Daniel Catán's opera Il Postino at the Los Angeles Opera. During the 2011–2012 season, Domingo sang Neptune in the Metropolitan Opera's world premiere performance of Jeremy Sams' The Enchanted Island. A pastiche of Baroque opera with story and characters drawn from Shakespeare's The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, a performance of the production was telecast on PBS' Great Performances at the Met.
caption: Domingo with American opera star and activist Stacey Robinson in 1994
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