Making Love to the Public

By William Bender

There are three sexes: men, women and tenors. -- Anonymous

Years ago, a leading New York tenor named Brignoli made a point of not being touched during onstage love scenes; that, he felt, would have been both indecent and unlucky. More recently, Soprano Beverly Sills went through an entire act of La Traviata with a tenor who never once looked at her. Conclusion: tenors as a group are still not only shorter and rounder than their heroines, but as adroit as ever at underwhelming them romantically.

A welcome exception is Tenor Placido Domingo, who not only looks at his heroines but seems to like them as well. Tall, dark and Teddy-bear handsome, Domingo at 29 is virile evidence that believability and passion are not necessarily inconsistent with operatic love. He has the sweetest and one of the biggest lyric-dramatic tenor voices on the operatic stage, and he phrases his serenades with a taste and elegance unmatched since the days of Jussi Bjorling. As an actor, he is manly, confident and capable of the kind of tender gestures that can thrill girls on both sides of the footlights. Four years ago, in a New York City Opera Traviata, Domingo inspired audible sobs all over the house when he carried the dying Violetta (Patricia Brooks) around in his arms like a baby. Says the still impressed Brooks: "Now every soprano wants to sing with Placido."

So it seems, anyway. Last week he was busy commuting between heroines at

Manhattan's Lincoln Center. On Tuesday at the Metropolitan Opera, Domingo portrayed King Gustav III of Sweden who tries to woo Montserrat Caballe away from her husband in Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera. On Thursday, across the plaza at the New York City Opera, where Domingo broke into the big time four years ago, he played the Earl of Essex to Beverly Sills' Queen Elizabeth in a splendid new production of Donizetti's Roberto Devereux. Like any operatic tenor, Domingo does a lot of theatrical dying. "When you are dying," he says with a wink, "you have more chance to suffer, and the public likes suffering."

The same tale of jealousy, love betrayed and suffering as Hollywood's 1939 heartthrobber The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, the new Devereux was even more of a showpiece for Beverly Sills than the film was for Bette Davis. Absent from the New York stage for more than a century, the opera was revived especially for Sills by the company's director, Julius Rudel. He conducted it adoringly and surrounded his prima diva with an all-star cast headed by Mezzo Beverly Wolff, Baritone Louis Quilico and, of course, Domingo. Amply returning the favor, Sills proved again that she is unsurpassed as a coloratura. With gestures ranging from near-hysteric twitching to imperious slaps, she brought the Virgin Queen's tragedy to dramatic life. More important, she turned Donizetti's ornate vocal scrolls into ear-ravishing laments of the utmost sadness.

Singing opposite Sills, many tenors sound pale and superfluous. But Sills and Domingo made an Elizabeth and

Essex any opera director might be tempted to swap his Ring cycle for. Bending to one knee in supplication, baring his chest with soldierly bravado, singing with graceful, silvery mastery, Domingo made their touching Act I duet a true meeting of romantic equals.

The Brave Bull. Domingo, who was born in Madrid in 1941, once hoped to become a matador when he grew up. By the time he fought his first bull, though, he was 14 and living with his parents in Mexico City. It was in a small ring where young bulls were tested for bravery. The one selected for Placido was very brave--braver, in fact, than Placido, who was badly battered; then and there he gave up the corrida for a career in music.

Six years later he made his operatic debut in Traviata with Mexico's National Opera. That same year he sang opposite Joan Sutherland in Lucia di Lammermoor with the Dallas Civic Opera. Then came an offer from the Israel National Opera in Tel Aviv. Nearly 300 performances later, Rudel signed Domingo and gave him the title role in Ginastera's Don Rodrigo at the February 1966 opening of the company's new home in Lincoln Center. Domingo was on his way.

No one can understand the opera until he accepts the fact that vocalism --good vocalism, that is--is the coagulant that binds everything and everybody together: fantasy and truth, performers and audience, hero and heroine. Says Domingo: "The voice must say I love you. Love for a heroine or hatred for a villain must be portrayed through the public." Domingo has the voice. He is acquiring a public ready and willing to jostle its way into the opera any night he chooses to sing.

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