How The 3 Tenors Sang The Hits And Changed The Game : Deceptive Cadence : NPR How The 3 Tenors Sang The Hits And Changed The Game Embed Embed How The 3 Tenors Sang The Hits And Changed The Game How The 3 Tenors Sang The Hits And Changed The Game Embed Embed Placido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, with conductor Zubin Mehta. Courtesy of the artists hide caption toggle caption Courtesy of the artists Placido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles, with conductor Zubin Mehta. Courtesy of the artists The Three Tenors joined to conquer. When this trio of famous opera singers — José Carreras, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti — gave a one-night-only show at Los Angeles' Dodger Stadium on July 16, 1994, it was a massive spectacle watched by a billion people worldwide. More than that, the Three Tenors phenomenon permanently altered how a large amount of classical music is presented, packaged and sold.

The Event Timed to coincide with the Brazil-Italy World Cup final being held the next day at the Rose Bowl in nearby Pasadena, the live concert was filmed for TV broadcast in more than 100 countries. It was enough of a draw that it was shown either immediately before or after the big game in most places. The stadium was filled to capacity for the debonair Carreras, heroic Domingo and golden Pavarotti. The VIP list was a star-studded 1990s dream cast. Former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara were in attendance, as were Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger and David Hasselhoff (don't discount what an international megastar he was back then).

Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra were on hand, too — smiling and nodding indulgently as the three opera singers gingerly made their way through "Singin' in the Rain" and "My Way." Article continues after sponsorship Backed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera Chorus and conducted by Zubin Mehta (who also did much to shape the program), with arrangements by Hollywood legend Lalo Schifrin , the trio winged their way jovially, if not terribly convincingly, through a string of haphazardly linked opera arias, Neapolitan songs and easy-listening favorites for a crowd of 56,000. All three pairs of the tenors' eyes were glued to music stands through the musical theater tunes and American pop standards. The words for the English-language selections were hidden under nearly impenetrable accents. Through most of the show, Pavarotti chomped gum insouciantly.

YouTube "Beaming, smirking, sweating, bellowing, selling, blowing kisses, waving hankies, punching the air with victorious fists and the sound system with climactic not-too-high notes" is how Martin Bernheimer of The Los Angeles Times put it . In the end, none of that mattered one iota. The Three Tenors in Concert 1994 was an astonishing success on every level. Well before Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti got to their grand-slam encores — the Verdi arias "La donna è mobile" and "Libiamo ne' lieti calici (Brindisi)" (which Atlantic Records had released as a single before the live date, and which went immediately to No. 1 on the European charts), followed by Puccini 's "Nessun dorma" — all the hard work had paid off. The CD and DVD versions of the concert, which the Warner label is rereleasing for this anniversary, went on to sell more than 8 million copies worldwide. But how had it come to be?

And was the Three Tenors phenomenon, as conductor Zubin Mehta dubbed it at the time, only just "like a comet " — having its blaze of glory and then vanishing without a trace? Hardly. Not only did the Three Tenors become a global pop-culture touchstone, but their albums, tours and videos shifted an entire segment of the music industry for good. The Backstory The 1994 Los Angeles concert wasn't the first time the three singers and Mehta had joined forces. In 1990, a concert presenter from Bologna, Italy, Mario Dradi, had brought the trio together in Rome for a concert at the Baths of Caracalla. According to a New York Times review of that concert, Pavarotti said the three had been asked "at least 50 times" to appear together before, but had always said no. YouTube What drew them into the Rome performance, they said, was a twofold impulse: to welcome Carreras' return to performing after defeating leukemia , and the tie-in to the 1990 World Cup, because football is a particular passion for them all.

Carreras is an avid Barcelona fan; Pavarotti played on his hometown team in Modena, Italy, as a young man; and Domingo, who has occasionally played in charity games, is a fervent Real Madrid supporter who was also tapped by FIFA a couple of years ago to serve on its ethics committee. It was Hungarian-born impresario Tibor Rudas, who was already Pavarotti's promoter, who created the Los Angeles spectacle. (Dradi was on the outs after he had sold the recording rights to the Rome show to the Decca label with no royalties going to the artists, only a fixed performance fee. Domingo in particular was said to have been furious : The Decca release was a worldwide smash in its own right that triggered the original Three Tenors craze.) Rudas — a born showman who had long worked in bookings in both Atlantic City, N.J., and Las Vegas — did his best to create an outsized event, all meant to help the audience forget that they were in a baseball stadium. His five-story set, inspired by the architecture of Budapest, was built in Hungary and assembled at an Air Force hangar in California.

It included massive amounts of suspended greenery, Hollywood production-house painted backdrops, and even waterfalls that had to be turned off at the beginning of the concert due to their noisiness. According to Rudas, the whole enterprise was so expensive that the ticket sales wouldn't cover his costs. Rudas wasn't the only impresario hovering around after the runaway success of Rome four years before. Both Carreras and Domingo had been working with German promoter Matthias Hoffmann, who also wanted in on the action. The single most telling moment in a hagiographic behind-the-scenes documentary that accompanies the LA concert film is when Domingo recounts how the performance came to be. Domingo says he went to FIFA himself to discuss an encore Three Tenors/World Cup extravaganza for Los Angeles in 1994, only to be told: "Mr. Rudas has already the rights." On camera, Domingo gives an elaborate shrug: "Well, fine, he has the rights, here we are." And one can't help but read some financial meaning into this account — securing those rights meant having a huge monetary stake in its success. And make no mistake, these spectacles, as a franchise, represented enormous money.

After the LA concert, they soon appeared in arenas and other huge venues around the world, from Tokyo to Göteborg, Sweden, with Hoffman finally at the helm after having bought Rudas' set and staging. The Money "Is it good money ?" Pavarotti once asked a reporter rhetorically about the lure of the Three Tenors billing. "By God, it's good money." Each tenor was paid about $1 million plus royalties for the Los Angeles show. (That would be worth approximately $1.6 million today.) When they headed out on their worldwide tour two years later, the three singers were earning $500,000 per concert apiece — about $800,000 in today's dollars — plus a percentage of all the merchandise sales and royalties. ( James Levine , who replaced Zubin Mehta on the later tours, earned a flat $500,000 per performance.) YouTube For the Los Angeles concert, VIPs were seated in the infield, and tickets went for between $15 and $1,000 apiece.

The New York Times quoted Rudas as saying that the ticket income for the LA show alone — not even counting the copious amount and variety of artist merchandise for sale at the venue, ranging from seat cushions to autographed baseballs — was a record-setting $13.5 million . The Los Angeles Times reported the concert gross as $12.5 million — still a huge number — and pointed out that the gross for the World Cup final between Brazil and Italy was just over $45 million. For a while in the mid- and late 1990s, after The Three Tenors hit, you couldn't open labels' new release books each month without having trios of singers vying for your attention. Tibor Rudas tried to strike gold again with a sopranos outfit (minus any household names). There were the African-American Three Mo' Tenors (at last count, actually 13 who have come and gone from the group).

A rush of regional acts sprang up, from The Irish Tenors to Australia's Ten Tenors to The Three Tenors from the Holy Land to Three Chinese Tenors to The Three Welsh Tenors to The Canadian Tenors (who have now settled into being just The Tenors, which is apparently description enough). Even the normally reserved label Harmonia Mundi entered the fray with a tongue-in-cheek trio of countertenors . The teenage Italian act Il Volo followed the same template, as did the Simon Cowell-produced quartet Il Divo . And just last week, a threesome called The Texas Tenors cracked the Billboard crossover Top 10 chart — and, yes, the Lone Star State singers, just like Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti, have their very own PBS pledge-drive special. There's plenty of evidence that the original tenor trio altered PBS' music and pledge programming permanently — and it marked the point at which artist managers and record labels started to see PBS as a crucial driver for album and ticket sales. The 1990 Three Tenors show was so successful on PBS that it was shown nine times.

(Clarification: a former Decca label executive has written to me to say that on the first night that the Rome special was shown on PBS in March 1991, it was played nine times in a row on the same evening on New York's Channel 13.) James Scalem, then vice president for fundraising programming at PBS, told the New York Times in 1994 that it was "by far the highest grossing fundraising program in public television history." Though Scalem didn't give the Times specifics, Channel 13, the main New York City-area PBS member station, told the paper that broadcasts of the 1990 special from Rome had raised more than $1 million for the channel. The Relationships Very soon, Three Tenors-style partnerships between record labels, PBS, independent producers and artist managers crystallized in a symbiotic relationship that persists to this day. Artists from the teen purity-dream Charlotte Church back in the early 2000s to this year's Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles nuns have launched projects with simultaneous album releases and PBS specials.

These dovetailing efforts are explicitly spelled out on press releases and on the sales sheets record labels distribute internally and also send out to retailers. (I've also been privy to such discussions during my own stints working at direct-to-consumer departments within two major-label companies, the now-defunct BMG and Sony, and when I was a columnist for Billboard Magazine, covering the business of classical music; in addition, my husband, Joshua Sherman , was directly involved in the production, sales and marketing of such crossover projects at BMG and later at Denon/Savoy Label Group.) PBS stations started to play an enormous role in the success of crossover acts at large venues across the U.S. During PBS pledge drives, many public TV stations showcase concert specials by such artists and offer, as high-priced pledge premiums, tickets to those artists' upcoming area concerts (which are booked by the artists' impresarios). This helps create regional touring circuits for performers who might otherwise not be able to sustain such tours. Using those public television pledge drives as their vehicles, impresarios can pre-sell huge venues with the help of PBS premium ticket sales — and, along the way, continue to build buzz for their artists. And those successes, in turn, drive more success.

If a crossover act does well during pledge drives, PBS stations will immediately buy into that group or artist's next television project and recycle previous TV pledge specials as well. That's a win for the artists and the impresarios, too, as the loop helps solidify an artist's American fan base between tours. The Legacy But what The Three Tenors — who, despite their diplomatic official billing in alphabetic order, soon became enshrined in American pop culture via Seinfeld as "Pavarotti, Domingo and that other guy " — also ushered in was a new era in crossover music that arguably outshined even the trios' own idols from previous generations, such as Mario Lanza in the 1940s and '50s and Enrico Caruso decades before that. Caruso and Lanza were surely icons, but they were singular superstars in their own respective eras. By contrast, The Three Tenors created a hugely lucrative subgenre. Call it "popera," call it "stadium classical," but a whole generation of artists from Andrea Bocelli to Jackie Evancho to Josh Groban (whom Domingo has recorded with ) were birthed on the Three Tenors aesthetic.

It features big vocal sounds (amplified, unlike traditional opera), backed by big, lush orchestras, in huge nonclassical venues — and sweepingly emotional old and new repertoire in arrangements that sound more like 1954 than 2014. And it's an aesthetic that still dominates the marketplace as well as the ears and eyes of concertgoers and TV viewers, even 20 years after that one concert at Dodgers Stadium. José Carreras on Apple Music To preview a song, mouse over the title and click Play. Open iTunes to buy and download music. Biography One of contemporary opera's most celebrated figures, José Carreras was perhaps best known for his association with the Three Tenors, a distinction he shared with Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. Born December 5, 1946, in the Spanish region of Catalonia, Carreras' gifts were recognized at a young age; as a child he sang along with the recordings of Mario Lanza and Giuseppe di Stefano, and by the time he was 11 made his operatic debut as the narrator in de Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show, produced at the famed Gran Teatro del Liceo in Barcelona.

At university, Carreras studied chemistry with the intent of joining the family cosmetics company; he nevertheless continued his voice lessons, however, and after winning the International Verdi Singing competition in Parma, Italy, his fate as a performer was sealed. In 1971, Carreras made his international debut in a performance of Donizetti's Maria Stuarda at the Festival Hall, London. A year later, he sang his first Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly with the New York City Opera; his Metropolitan Opera debut as Cavaradossi in Tosca came in 1974, and later that same year he appeared at London's Covent Garden, Vienna's Straatsoper, and Milan's Scala in Un Bolla in Maschera. In 1976, Carreras sang Verdi's Requiem at the Salzburg Easter Festival at the invitation of Herbert von Karajan; performances and recordings of various works followed, and over time the maestro and the tenor cultivated a remarkably strong artistic bond.

Over the course of his career, Carreras recorded more than 50 complete operas and 40 classical and popular recitals; in 1992, he served as musical director for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Summer Olympic Games in his native Barcelona, and he also published an autobiography, José Carreras, Singing from the Soul, detailing his battle with leukemia. ~ Jason Ankeny Top Albums The Three Tenors in Concert, 1994 by José Carreras, Plácido Domingo & Luciano Pavarotti on Apple Music by Quint1111 What a great album. Even if u don't like this kind of music listen to it & then u will✌️ Biography Born: December 5, 1946 in Barcelona, Spain Genre: Classical Years Active: '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s One of contemporary opera's most celebrated figures, José Carreras was perhaps best known for his association with the Three Tenors, a distinction he shared with Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo.

Born December 5, 1946, in the Spanish region of Catalonia, Carreras' gifts were recognized at a young age; as a child he sang along with the recordings of Mario Lanza and Giuseppe di Stefano, and by the time he was 11 made his operatic debut as the narrator in de Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show,... Top Albums and Songs by José Carreras 1. The Three Tenors - Music on Google Play The Three Tenors About the artist The Three Tenors were a popular operatic singing group during the 1990s and early 2000s, consisting of Spaniards Plácido Domingo and José Carreras and the Italian Luciano Pavarotti. The trio began their collaboration with a performance at the ancient Baths of Caracalla in Rome, Italy on 7 July 1990, the eve of the 1990 FIFA World Cup Final. Zubin Mehta conducted the orchestra of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the orchestra of Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. The recording of this debut concert became the best-selling classical album of all time and led to additional performances and live albums.

Around 1.3 billion viewers worldwide watched their second televised performance four years later at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. They last performed together at an arena in Columbus, Ohio on 28 September 2003. Nessun Dorma Three Tenors 1994 Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti - YouTube Nessun Dorma Three Tenors 1994 Carreras, Domingo, Pavarotti Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Uploaded on May 26, 2007 Nessun Dorma from Turandot. Performed by Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo & Luciano Pavarotti. Conducted by Zubin Mehta. Performed at Dodger Stadium in 1994, Los Angeles in front of 56, 000 people. If you were there, please add a comment.

Category José Carreras | New Music And Songs | José Carreras About José Carreras One of contemporary opera's most celebrated figures, José Carreras was perhaps best known for his association with the Three Tenors, a distinction he shared with Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. Born December 5, 1946, in the Spanish region of Catalonia, Carreras' gifts were recognized at a young age; as a child he sang along with the recordings of Mario Lanza and Giuseppe di Stefano, and by the time he was 11 made his operatic debut as the narrator in de Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show, produced at the famed Gran Teatro del Liceo in Barcelona. At university, Carreras studied chemistry with the intent of joining the family cosmetics company; he nevertheless continued his voice lessons, however, and after winning the International Verdi Singing competition in Parma, Italy, his fate as a performer was sealed. In 1971, Carreras made his international debut in a performance of Donizetti's Maria Stuarda at the Festival Hall, London.

A year later, he sang his first Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly with the New York City Opera; his Metropolitan Opera debut as Cavaradossi in Tosca came in 1974, and later that same year he appeared at London's Covent Garden, Vienna's Straatsoper, and Milan's Scala in Un Bolla in Maschera. In 1976, Carreras sang Verdi's Requiem at the Salzburg Easter Festival at the invitation of Herbert von Karajan; performances and recordings of various works followed, and over time the maestro and the tenor cultivated a remarkably strong artistic bond. Over the course of his career, Carreras recorded more than 50 complete operas and 40 classical and popular recitals; in 1992, he served as musical director for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Summer Olympic Games in his native Barcelona, and he also published an autobiography, José Carreras, Singing from the Soul, detailing his battle with leukemia.

~ Jason Ankeny, Rovi Hear more of Biography - Plácido Domingo Plácido Domingo News Biography The more Plácido Domingo has studied, travelled and performed, the deeper his love of music has become. He maintains an active performing career as singer and conductor in addition to his work as a cultural impresario and entrepreneur. He serves as General Director of the Los Angeles Opera; Chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry; President of Europa Nostra; Founder of Operalia, the World Opera Competition; and proprietor of Pampano, his restaurant in New York City. PLÁCIDO DOMINGO Singer, conductor and administrator Plácido Domingo has been described in the international press as "the King of Opera," "a true renaissance man in music" and "the greatest operatic artist of modern times." At home on the world's stages for over half a century, he has sung – as of 2016 – more than 3,800 performances of 147 roles, in addition to having conducted well over 500 performances and made hundreds of audio and video recordings and films.

Chad Batka He has been included in the Guinness Book of Records for the size of his repertoire and for having received 101 curtain calls after a performance – Verdi's Otello at the Vienna State Opera. His appearances around the world with his colleagues José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti in the now legendary Three Tenors concerts were one of the great musical success stories of the 1990s. As an opera administrator, too, Domingo has played an essential role in making regional American companies into internationally recognized ensembles, as General Director, first, of Washington National Opera, and currently as General Director of Los Angeles Opera. Few if any other performers have been able to look back on so successful, variegated and well-documented a career, and at the age of seventy-five Domingo forges ahead with a total, unabated sense of commitment. His charm and the extraordinary kindness that he demonstrates towards everyone with whom he comes in contact enthrall thousands year after year. His voice’s exceptionally warm timbre and equally exceptional flexibility combine with his remarkable acting talent to give him what he thinks of as a great opportunity to give pleasure to people throughout the world.

Plácido Domingo Embil was born in Madrid on 21 January 1941. His father, Plácido Domingo, Sr., and his mother, Pepita Embil, were celebrated performers of zarzuela, the Spanish form of operetta, which their son loves to this day. In 1949 his parents established their own theatre company in Mexico, and the eight-year-old Plácido and his sister followed their parents there. Mexico City remained his home for thirteen years: he went to school there and was enthusiastic about football (soccer) and the corrida (bullfighting). Football has remained one of Domingo’s great passions, mainly as a spectator – especially as a fan of the Real Madrid team – although he has occasionally participated in benefit matches, and he also attends Formula One races whenever he can. He received his first piano lessons when he was eight years old, and at the age of fourteen he was accepted at Mexico’s National Music Conservatory. But he soon faced major difficulties. He married when he was sixteen, and the following year he became the father of a son, José.

His first marriage did not last long, but these early responsibilities explain why he had to begin to work hard at so early an age. He took any job that came his way in the colorful world of music and the theatre, and, thanks to his work with his parents’ ensemble, he learned all the basics of musical theatre, including its harsh economic realities. These experiences stood him in good stead later, in his various positions as an opera administrator. Young Plácido accompanied singers at the piano, in classy and not-so-classy bars; played piano for a travelling ballet troupe; arranged his own music program with a new cultural radio station in Mexico City; accepted small acting roles in television productions of plays by Pirandello, Benavente, García Lorca and Chekhov; and compiled background music for radio series. But he also sang in the musical The Redhead, trained choruses for zarzuelas and musicals, produced Spanish-language arrangements of American pop music for Mexican recordings, and made himself available as a singer of background music.

He became his mother’s piano accompanist during her solo performances, and he took on smaller baritone roles in his parents’ company as well as a minor role in the first Mexican production of My Fair Lady, which was performed 185 times. He also appeared in 170 performances of The Merry Widow. Each of these activities would prove to be of great benefit to him later in his life. Nineteen-fifty-nine was a decisive year: Domingo, only eighteen years old, auditioned as a baritone for the Mexican National Opera. The committee liked his voice very much and the members also allowed him to audition with a tenor aria, which made him realize that he was really a tenor and not a baritone. He was initially engaged to sing small tenor parts, and he debuted that autumn as Borsa in Verdi’s Rigoletto. The first leading role followed only two years later, in Monterrey: Alfredo in La traviata. At first, however, he sang mainly minor roles, and in November 1961 he made his U.S. debut in Dallas as Arturo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.

The following year brought important changes: Plácido Domingo married the soprano Marta Ornelas, with whom he had become acquainted at the conservatory. Both moved to Tel Aviv, where they performed with the Hebrew National Opera for three seasons, learning a great deal in the process. At the same time, Marta and their friend Franco Iglesias – a Mexican baritone who also belonged to the ensemble – helped Plácido to develop his singing technique. Thus the path for one of the greatest careers in the history of opera was paved. Upon the Domingos’ return from Israel, Marta gave up her singing career to devote herself entirely to raising their two sons (Plácido, Jr., was born in 1965 and Alvaro in 1968) and to her husband’s career. She remains his adviser to this day, and now that the children are grown up she has regained a foothold in the opera world as a stage director – a fact of which Plácido is very proud. Only six months after his departure from Tel Aviv, Domingo was called to New York: the New York City Opera wanted him for the U.S.

première of Alberto Ginastera’s Don Rodrigo, with which the ensemble opened its Lincoln Center residency at the New York State Theater. The breakthrough had been achieved, and Plácido Domingo received a wealth of engagements. In 1967 he debuted at the Hamburg State Opera, in Tosca, and at the Vienna State Opera in Don Carlo; in 1969 at the Verona Arena in Turandot, at San Francisco Opera in La bohème, and at La Scala in Milan in Ernani; in 1970 in his native Madrid (La Gioconda) and at the Edinburgh Festival (Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis); in 1971 at London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (Tosca); in 1972 at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich (La bohème); in 1973 at the Paris Opéra (Il trovatore); and in 1975 at the Salzburg Festival (Don Carlo). The audience at the Bayreuth Festival experienced Plácido Domingo for the first time in 1992 when he sang the title role in Parsifal.

Numerous engagements since then have regularly brought this exceptional performer to virtually all of the world’s great opera houses. Domingo has neither a favorite opera role nor a favorite opera house, yet he has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York more frequently than at any other theatre. He made his house debut in 1968 as Maurizio in Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, and since then he has sung with the company every season, in a total of over 800 performances of 46 roles. To date he has opened the Met’s season no fewer than twenty times, breaking the record previously held by Enrico Caruso. He has also conducted there many times – increasingly so in recent years. In 1983, in his memoir (original title: My First Forty Years), Domingo defended himself against critics who had accused him of taking too many vocal risks by singing too much and singing roles that were not right for his voice. Of course, every singer has successful and less successful evenings, but Domingo – who can look back on many thousands of rehearsals and performances over nearly half a century, and at the highest artistic level – can assert with pride that his decisions were the right ones.

His voice has endured in beautiful condition far beyond the average professional lifetime of most singers. Among many other achievements, his interpretation of Otello remains unequalled. Domingo’s opera repertoire extends from Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) to numerous world premieres of operas by contemporary composers. In Anton García Abril’s Las Divinas palabras he inaugurated the restored Teatro Real in Madrid in October 1997. In Los Angeles in September 2003, he sang the role of Rasputin at the world premiere of Deborah Drattell’s Nicholas and Alexandra, and in Vienna the following July he performed Goya, an opera written especially for him by Gian Carlo Menotti (first performance 1986, in Washington). Met audiences saw him in the title role in the world premiere, in 2007, of The First Emperor by the Chinese composer Tan Dun, and in Los Angeles in 2010 Domingo created the role of Pablo Neruda in the world premiere of Il Postino by the Mexican composer Daniel Catán.

In 2011 he was Neptune in the world premiere production of the Met’s Baroque pastiche opera, The Enchanted Island. Domingo has also been instrumental in reviving some rarely performed operas from the past, notably Franco Alfano’s Cyrano de Bergerac, in which he sang the title role at the Met in May 2005 and later at La Scala and elsewhere. But well-known works such as Tosca, La bohème and Carmen have accompanied Domingo on his path through life, and he has also conducted many of these operas. He set a personal record in July 2003 in London when he sang the matinee performance of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and conducted the evening performance of the same opera. Major new roles in the 1990s and early 2000s included Siegmund in Wagner's Die Walküre and the title part in the same composer's Parsifal, as well as Gherman in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades.

In 2007 Domingo devoted himself to important works of the baroque and early classical eras by giving his first performances as Oreste in Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride at the Seattle Opera as well as the Met and as Bajazet in Handel's Tamerlano at the Washington National Opera. Since 2009 he has been adding lyric baritone parts to his repertoire: the title role of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra at the Berlin Staatsoper, La Scala, the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden and Madrid's Teatro Real; the title role in Verdi's Rigoletto in an on-location worldwide telecast; Athanaël in Massenet's Thaïs; and six other Verdi roles: Francesco Foscari in I due Foscari, Giorgio Germont in La traviata, the title parts in Nabucco and Macbeth, Giacomo in Giovanna d'Arco, and the Count di Luna in Il Trovatore. Since 1993 Domingo has promoted highly talented young singers through his Operalia voice competition.

Each year, in a different international city, forty pre-selected singers have the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities before an international jury, and Operalia has helped to launch the careers of such artists as Joyce DiDonato, Eric Owens, Rolando Villazón, Erwin Schrott, Joseph Calleja, Isabelle Bayrakdarian, and many others. In March 2002 the Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program – another of Domingo’s undertakings to nurture and give opportunities to promising young talents – came into being at the Washington National Opera, and similar objectives are at the heart of the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program, subsequently founded under the auspices of Los Angeles Opera, and the Centre de Perfeccionament Plácido Domingo at the Palau de las Arts in Valencia, Spain. Plácido Domingo has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and has been a Kennedy Center Honoree in the United States; he is also a Commandant of the Legion of Honor in France, an Honorary Knight of the British Empire, and both a Grande Ufficiale and a Cavaliere di Gran Croce of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

He has received honorary doctorates from Oxford University and New York University for his lifelong commitment and contribution to music and the arts. In October 2009, King Carl Gustaf of Sweden presented him with the first Birgit Nilsson Prize (at one million dollars, the most generous prize in the world of classical music) for his outstanding achievements in opera; the prize was donated to help fund Operalia. Domingo has raised millions of dollars through benefit concerts to aid the victims of Mexico’s devastating 1985 earthquake, the floods caused by Hurricane Paulina in Guerrero and Yucatán (also in Mexico and in El Salvador), and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where, in 2009, the stage of the Mahalia Jackson Theatre for the Performing Arts was named for him. In 2006, he conducted Verdi’s Requiem in Warsaw, to commemorate the first anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s passing. Many of Domingo’s recordings – including some of light and Latino music – have sold over a million copies, and this achievement has garnered for him several gold and platinum records as well as twelve Grammy awards.

In addition, he has collaborated in three famous opera films: La traviata and Otello under the direction of Franco Zeffirelli and Carmen directed by Francesco Rosi. Domingo was honored with Emmy awards for the television film “Hommage à Sevilla” and for the Met’s Silver Gala. He has also made excursions into popular culture: his voice was featured in the 2008 Disney film “Beverly Hills Chihuahua,” in a 2012 special edition of the children’s educational cartoon “Dora the Explorer,” and as Skeleton Jorge in the 2014 animated film “Book of Life,” and he appeared as himself (in cartoon format) in a 2007 episode of “The Simpsons.” He appeared at the closing night of the 2014 iTunes Festival and performed with pianist Lang Lang in a headliner concert during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Domingo is President of Europa Nostra, an organization that champions projects of restoration and preservation of Europe's cultural heritage.

His role as Chairman of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has him lobbying for the protection of intellectual property within the music industry and on the Internet. He also sits on the Board of Trustees of the National YoungArts Foundation, which supports all artistic disciplines among young American-based high school graduates; through this program he became the first teacher on the HBO MasterClass series, on which he was followed by Frank Gehry, Julian Schnabel, Josh Groban, Joshua Bell, Alan Alda, Renée Fleming, Michael Tilson Thomas, Liv Ullmann, Edward Albee, Jacques d'Amboise, Kathleen Turner and others. Domingo’s strong bond with zarzuela stimulated him to promote this wonderful form of Spanish operetta and make it more accessible to an international audience. He appeared in Federico Moreno Torroba’s Luisa Fernanda in Milan and Vienna, singing – like his father many years ago – the baritone role of Don Vidal. Luisa Fernanda was also performed by Washington National Opera in 2004, at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2006 and by Los Angeles Opera in 2007.

Years ago, a fan suggested that Plácido Domingo (whose name translates literally as “Placid Sunday”) should use the saying “If I rest, I rust™” as a motto. In fact, Domingo has been incessantly active since the age of sixteen ― and the more he has studied, travelled and performed, the more he has felt fulfilled and the deeper his love of music has become. All in all, he considers himself the happiest person he knows, since he has seen much of the world and has been able to give pleasure to millions through his art. He thinks of his talent and his voice as gifts to be shared, and this is why he is currently working on a book , The Joy of Opera, in which he will convey the greatness of the art he has so devotedly served throughout his long professional life.

(September 2016) Jose Carreras: 'The Three Tenors meant people were no longer afraid to go to the opera' Jose Carreras: 'The Three Tenors meant people were no longer afraid to go to the opera' Nigel Farndale 25 February 2016 • 7:00am I meet Jose Carreras in his hometown of Barcelona - at a youthful 69, he looks pretty much as he did at the height of his fame in his 40s, the main difference being his collar-length hair is now white. There are no platinum discs on the walls (he has sold a staggering 85 million records, making him one of the most commercially successful opera singers of all time). Nor are there images of him on stage in his greatest operatic roles (as one of the most celebrated tenors in the world in the 1970s and 80s, he was known for his clarity of tone and romantic expression, as well as his nuanced interpretations of Verdi and Puccini). But there are photographs of him visiting leukaemia patients, children mostly, and they are a reminder of where we are: The Josep Carreras Leukaemia Foundation.

This spelling of his first name is significant, and we shall come to it, for now it is appropriate to mention that the Foundation, which also has branches in America, Germany and Switzerland, raises millions of euros a year for research. It’s quite a legacy, one born of Carreras’s own struggle with leukaemia. The Three Tenors (L-R): Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras, in 2003 Credit: Barry Batchelor/PA In 1987, aged 40, he was given a one in ten chance of surviving the disease. He now has a clean bill of health, and looks fit in neatly-pressed grey cords, a tie, tweed jacket and silk kerchief. His eyes are steady; the colour of chocolate. And his manner is friendly and open, if a little imperious. (His staff, I notice, refer to him as Mr Carreras.) After his operation and chemotherapy, he was never quite able to return to his full, punishing operatic schedule. He found instead a new role for himself as a populariser of opera.

Most famously, as a fanatical football fan, he came up with the idea of forming The Three Tenors to mark the opening of the 1990 World Cup in Italy. He and his friends Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti intended the concert as a one off, but such was its popularity they ended up performing together a further 30 times, racking up colossal record sales along the way (which still hold the record for classical music). Though they all had different singing styles, The Three Tenors had in common a passion for football, which they talked about much more than opera. When I ask Carreras how there was room on the stage for those three egos, he laughs. “Well, we were all trying to be the best, it’s true. And of course there was rivalry, but it was healthy. We had different looks and voices, but we created a chemistry that worked. If tenors seem to have big egos it is because of the characters we play, it’s part of the show.

You are the lover, or the hero with the sword and cape.” Jose Carreras as the title role in Massenet's Werther, 1978 Credit: Ron Scherl/Redferns As for their lasting impact, there has yet to be an operatic event popular enough to have eclipsed the coming together of the trio. Carreras reflects: 'I think The Three Tenors did a lot of good for opera as an art form, introducing it to people who weren’t familiar with this kind of music. If one of our concerts has been shown to a thousand million people on television it means a lot. For some humble people it meant they were no longer afraid to go to opera houses.’ And perhaps they started a shift, that meant, to Carreras’s mind, opera is not as elitist as it once was. 'Compared to the 1970s and 80s, I think a broader range of people go to the opera today,” says Carreras. “People used to worry about what clothes to wear, now they don’t.

And now in most opera houses in Europe they do special performances for kids, as well as open dress rehearsals for them, and that is good because that is where the love starts.’ Watch: Exclusive live streams from Glyndebourne Carreras is performing in a new opera at the Vienna State Opera House in July, El Juez, by Christian Kolonovits, about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Before then he is coming to London to perform “A life in Music” at the Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic. He will be singing the songs that have influenced his life, from Catalan folk music to the American songbook, taking in some more heavy-duty arias along the way. He has eclectic taste. One of his happiest memories, he says, was performing My Way in front of Frank Sinatra . In his time, Carreras has performed with most of the great sopranos, including Birgit Nilsson and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, but the one he felt closest to was Montserrat Caballé, “even though we are so different in terms of our personalities, on stage something happened between us.

Along with Maria Callas I think she was the greatest, with all respect to the others I worked with!” The world's most glamorous opera stars Carreras’s parents didn’t go to the opera when he was growing up, but as a child he did happen to see Mario Lanza in the film The Great Caruso, and it changed his life. “I was six and I wanted to be him, so I would spend hours singing 'le donna e mobile’ in the bathroom.” Does he wonder what might have become of his life if he hadn’t by chance seen that film? “I don’t know, I think I would still have been drawn to the arts. I don’t think I would have been a footballer, though I have always been passionate about it.” What is it about him and football? “It is 90 minutes of forgetting about everything else. Escapism. But for Catalonians who support FC Barcelona, as I do, there is something else. For many years under Franco’s dictatorship it was a way of keeping your identity as a little country with your own language and traditions.” This is why he uses the name Josep for his Foundation. It is Catalan. Under Franco he was obliged to use the Spanish version José.

I take it he’s a separatist, then? “What I would like is the right to vote so that we can decide for ourselves, like you did in the UK with the Scottish referendum. Here 49% of the parliament are for the independence of Catalonia.” Jose Carreras in Latvia, February 2016 Credit: Ints Kalnins/Reuters I ask him what it was like growing up in Franco’s Spain. “There was severe repression. You had to compromise with yourself. But my parents felt more strongly about it than me, because they had actually fought against Franco. My father had been a French teacher and was forced to give that up.” He became a traffic policeman instead; his mother worked in a beauty salon. “I was 18 when she died, which means she never saw me become successful as an opera singer.” He describes himself as compulsive and self-critical. “I would be disappointed most of the time by my performances. Like when I listen to my recordings, you become ultra-critical, especially straight afterwards. But when I listen again after twenty years I think, actually, that was pretty good.” Did his illness change his personality, as well as his singing voice?

“I think everyone who goes through an extreme period of suffering becomes more mature... Afterwards, when the doctors told me I was going to be OK, I thought 'I’m going to make so much more of my life’. I told my wife I was going to be a better man from now on, but you feel so good you forget and slip into old habits, repeat the same mistakes as before.” What sort of mistakes? “I can be selfish as well as generous. I don’t always make the right decisions.” 'An artist has to be selfish sometimes': Jose Carreras, c.1970 Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty His first wife and his mistress took turns sitting by his hospital bed. After he recovered, he divorced his wife and married his mistress, but now they too have separated. Was he difficult to live with? “I had a wonderful relationship with my last wife but, like with so many couples, we decided the best thing for both of us was to go our separate ways. An artist has to be selfish sometimes. If I have a performance at La Scala next day I’m not going to the restaurant that night to please my wife.” Is he in a relationship at the moment?

“No, I am single.” The great loves of his life these days, he says, are his two children and five grandchildren. “Latin people are not afraid of showing how much we love our children. I am an indulgent grandfather.” So far none of the grandchildren have shown signs of having inherited his sublime singing voice. “But they are still young,” he says with a shrug. “There is time yet.” José Carreras performs A life in Music at the Royal Albert Hall on 15 May; royalalberthall.com ; 020 7589 8212 Premium 25 Nov 2016, 9:00pm

Question: How were Plcido Domingo, Jos Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti known collectively?
Answer: Three tenors