Plácido Domingo: 1941—: Opera Singer, Conductor, Administrator

As a young man Domingo also excelled as a soccer goalie, but he elected to embark on a musical career and enrolled at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City. He studied both voice (as a baritone at first) and conducting. His musical theater experience led to his first professional roles, one in the Mexican production of the U.S. musical My Fair Lady and the other in a 1957 zarzuela production. Domingo's operatic debut came in 1960 with the Mexican National Opera, in Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto. He served his apprenticeship in the opera world with a two-and-a-half year stint in Israel in the early 1960s, singing in 280 performances (most of them in Hebrew) with that country's national opera company.

By the late 1960s, Domingo was ready to conquer the stages of the world's major opera houses. He joined the New York City Opera in 1965 and quickly impressed critics with his acting skills—sometimes a weak point among conservatory-trained and technique-focused singers, but second nature to the raised-in-the-theatre Domingo. Throughout his career he would be praised for the depth of his dramatic interpretations, and of all the roles he has performed he is perhaps most identified with Verdi's Otello, based on the Shakespeare play Othello and making similarly difficult interpretive demands on its star.

Domingo made his most important debut at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1968, in the opera Adriana Lecouvreur. Pavarotti made his own debut there during the same season, which is remembered as "an important one in Met history," according to Opera News writer Walter Price. Price pointed to the "burnished, dark color" of Domingo's voice. Through the 1990s Domingo appeared at the Met at least once each season, and his debut there was followed by appearances at the major European opera houses. By the mid-1970s, Domingo was considered one of the top tenors in the world.