Domingo on the mound

'The tenor is like the pitcher in baseball,' he says. In an upcoming concert (and maybe at Fenway) he's out to show he still has the stuff.

It is easier for a man to pass through the eye of a needle than to arrange an interview with Placido Domingo. His American PR man has to talk with his German agent, who talks with his personal manager, who talks with his son, Alvaro, who sometimes travels with his father. Domingo is in Madrid, singing in Handel's "Tamerlano." When contacted, Alvaro tells the manager, who tells the agent, who tells you, that he is between performances and not talking. Domingo's motto is "If I rest, I rust." This does not extend, however, to interviews. Silence is the best medicine for the voice. Silence is why he is still singing at 67. They will let you know tomorrow.

Two days later, and two hours after the appointed time, the phone rings. You've been humming "Granada" all day - a Pavlovian reaction after all those Three Tenors concerts - and putting off lunch. (When the world's greatest tenor is about to call, you don't want to have food in your mouth.) Alvaro is on the line, and quickly passes the phone to the Maestro, who greets his interviewer warmly. There's that famous speaking voice, soft and smooth as Amontillado wine. But it has an edge, a shortness that tells you this will be short. Tomorrow is another performance day, and it's already 9 p.m., Madrid time. The curtain of non-talking will descend.

Domingo seems busier than ever. In between opera performances he runs the opera companies in Los Angeles and Washington; hosts the Operalia international vocal competition in Spain; conducts in LA, at New York's Metropolitan Opera, and elsewhere (he is premiering a new opera in Paris soon); and - a new venture - giving eight to 10 big-venue concerts with orchestra around the world per year, stepping into the late Luciano Pavarotti's vacated niche. The first of these in the United States will be April 14 at the Citi Wang Theatre.

This is an occasion. It is Domingo's first solo concert here, and his first visit since 1972. It may also be a farewell. At some point comes the awkward but inevitable question: When will he retire?

Domingo doesn't have to give interviews. Tickets to the Wang would probably sell well without one. It is his ravenous desire to be liked that compels him. Domingo is as addicted to his public as it is to him. When he flies into Boston this Friday, his handlers hope to take him to Fenway, to sing "God Bless America" during the seventh-inning stretch of the Sox-Yankees game. He knows his people.

"His people" now include just about everyone. The former toddlers who remember him on "Sesame Street," singing with his namesake, Placido Flamingo. The former teenagers who were excited by Julia Migenes-Johnson's sexy Carmen and his blond Don Jose in Francesco Rosi's 1984 film. The crooner fans who bought his 1982 CD "Perhaps Love," back when crossover was controversial. Then there are the millions who have heard him with Pavarotti and Jose Carreras - the Three Tenors - live and recorded for TV and CD, between their first concert in Rome in 1990 and their last, in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2005 (when they were down to two, Pavarotti being ill.)

That's to say nothing of Domingo's opera performances, which number more than 3,000. The largest share of these have been at the Met: 619 performances so far, including a record 21 opening nights. (Caruso had 17.) This fall, Domingo added Oreste in Gluck's "Iphigenie en Tauride" to his repertoire, and in Madrid - his birthplace - he just took his first Handel role, Bajazet in "Tamerlano." That brings his total number of roles to 126, more than any other tenor in modern times. Numbers, numbers. Talking about Domingo is like talking baseball (a sport he loves).

"There's no one else who can keep his schedule for decades and still sing as beautifully and be as generous an artist as he is," says Ana Maria Martinez, the rising young American soprano and protégée who will join him onstage in Boston. "I don't think anyone who sees him will ever say he's holding himself back, saving himself. He gives you everything he's got . . . at every performance."

First and last 'Messiah'

Boston has not heard him often, but it heard him early. A clipping from Dec. 11, 1965, reveals that Domingo sang the tenor solos in "Messiah" with the Handel and Haydn Society. In his review, the Globe's Michael Steinberg wrote: "Domingo has an unusually handsome voice and apparently considerable musicianship and technique." But he was "riveted so closely to his score that he seemed to be finding out about 'Messiah' one eighth note at a time." The Herald's critic noted that he sang "with intensity, but after a time [. . .] showed a tendency to become strained."

"I remember," Domingo says. "I was singing in Israel and came here for auditions, and my agency set that up." It was his first "Messiah" and a quick learn. (It was also his last "Messiah," he says.) Two months later, he sang the title role of Alberto Ginastera's "Don Rodrigo" at the New York City Opera, and had a success that launched his US opera career.

That spring, he was back to sing with Sarah Caldwell's Opera Company of Boston, once in Rameau's "Hippolyte and Aricie" with Beverly Sills, and then in Puccini's "La Bohème" with Renata Tebaldi. For "Bohème," Caldwell is said to have paid him $250 plus a baby sitter. "That could be!" he says, laughing. What he remembers more clearly is that he and Tebaldi began rehearsing without a Musetta or a Marcello, two principal roles. Caldwell was always a late planner. "A tremendous theater woman," Domingo says, minimally and without a trace of irony.

Since then, he has returned to Boston twice. In 1969 he sang in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the Boston Symphony at Erich Leinsdorf's farewell concert as music director. Three years later, Domingo sang Gounod's Faust with the Met company on its annual visit to the Hynes Civic Auditorium. For 36 years, Boston hasn't heard him in person - though in this multimedia age it is hard to feel deprived.

A friendly rivalry

For decades, he was one of the two tenors the world loved best. He and Pavarotti made a study in contrasts. At their Three Tenors concerts, Pavarotti had the "boy in front of the crowd" appeal and the high notes, Domingo that special Catalan elegance. (Carreras was, as they said on "Seinfeld," "the other one.") "I think the career of Luciano was bigger because I was there, as a friendly rival," Domingo once said. "And I think my career was bigger because he was there also, as the friendly rival."

In later years, Pavarotti largely gave up the opera house for park and stadium concerts, where he would keep crowds guessing about whether he would appear and coasted on his high notes. He confessed, when he was dying, that he had enjoyed life and was paying for it. Domingo, more disciplined in his life and focused on his art, has endured and bestrides the world, a graying Colossus.

His recipe for longevity is discipline and rest - the discipline to rest. "The tenor is like the pitcher in baseball. You have to have the rotation, you can't play every day. You have to watch what you eat and how you live," he says.

You cannot live on caution, however. What keeps him going is "la pasión" (the word almost melts the phone line) for singing and for the theater. He got both the passion and his work ethic, he says, from his parents, singers who left Spain when he was 8 years old to start a zarzuela (operetta) company in Mexico City. The theater, the whole operation, was in his blood from early on.

"My parents had to plan everything, and give maybe two performances a day, too, and three on Sunday. And of course they had to rehearse after the performances. Even when I was in school, I went to performances," he says. He was given a few child roles and, after he learned the piano, began accompanying and helping coach singers. He was trained in piano, conducting, and singing at the National Conservatory of Music, and then, at age 18, joined the Mexican National Opera.

He was a baritone who wanted desperately to be a tenor. He was inspired by recordings of Caruso and Mario Lanza, and surely he had noticed that the tenor, not the baritone, gets the soprano. So he worked his voice up, "semitone by semitone," into the tenor range. "I thought, I will be a lyric baritone forever," he says. He remembers the tears in his mother's eyes when he first produced a solid, full tenor sound.

You can still hear a trace of the struggle. He does not have the easy, ringing high Bs and Cs that Pavarotti did. Instead he has capitalized on his other strengths - the smooth line, the warm timbre - and kept pushing into new repertoire. In the last decade, he has conquered several Wagner roles, bringing a Spanish dark coloring and bel canto elegance to Tristan (in an EMI recording).

The struggle taught him wisdom about his voice, Martinez says. "He will never push beyond what he's capable. He sometimes says when you know your body and your technique, you should stretch a little bit, but after he stretches he will come back to something comfortable."

Milestones ahead

His drive, the need to conquer, to push the envelope, survives. In Boston he'll perform a program of arias and duets, Latin and Broadway songs, and zarzuela. He will sing "Tamerlano" again at Washington Opera. Then come more Met performances of Tan Dun's "The First Emperor," in a role he originated last season, satisfying a wish to premiere a new opera at the Met. After "Die Walküre" in Barcelona, he'll sing "Luisa Fernanda," a famous zarzuela, in Vienna. Meanwhile he will conduct operas in Los Angeles ("Tosca") and Paris (the world premiere of Howard Shore's adaptation of David Cronenberg's film "The Fly"). That gets us as far as August.

Next year the Met celebrates Domingo's 40th anniversary with the company, a record for leading tenors. (Only a handful of others have reached that milestone.) In the works is a new opera, based on the film "Il Postino" by Mexican composer Daniel Catan, due for Los Angeles in 2009. Domingo has said he does not expect to be singing opera when he is 70.

Time to mention the word: retirement. He surprises by not flinching. "I feel like it's an aspect you have to live with. You know that any day you might not have the same kind of possibilities. The voice it goes like any other thing, and you have to be ready. I will accept it because I won't have any other choice, and I will be happy and thanking God for giving me so much." Is he surprised at how much God has given him? "Absolutely. I'm very surprised the last 12 or 13 years."

He caused a stir last year when he announced plans to sing his first baritone role, Simon Boccanegra in Verdi's great opera. Dates have been set for 2009-10 at La Scala, Berlin, Madrid, London. New York is still a "maybe." How dramatic if his Boccanegra arrived at the Met on Jan. 21, 2011, his 70th birthday. But there's some hesitation in his voice. Maybe he'll put the whole thing off.

"We'll see. My only question is maybe it's coming too early. I am still singing and longing for tenor roles."

There must be one or two left.