Placido Domingo

The press regularly proclaims my ambitions and my financial demands.

It is strange, but nobody is shocked when pop singers make a fortune in the space of two years.

Don’t you think it astonishing that, at 58, I am still working at improving my career?

Singing becomes a form of therapy.

With my personal preparation at the piano, I can afford to hum at half voice.

If money was my only motivation, I would organize myself differently.

I will prove that a great conducting career is expecting me.

Honestly, if the public still wants to hear me in some works, I have to go down a half step.

When I was a young man, I was a baritone, very far from possessing the whole range of the tenor then.

My strength is my enthusiasm.

I attended less than two years of Conservatory in Mexico City.

Should it happen tomorrow, I would fall to my knees to give thanks to God for such a career.

I have always studied my parts with the orchestral score and not with the piano reduction.

But enough joking. I am singing. This is all my life.

Young singers are much better educated musically, much better informed, through discs and videos, than I was.

On the other hand, I have devoted so much energy to reach the top that I accept the stress of being there.

I am never wrong when it comes to my possibilities.

This season, over eight productions, I am presenting four young tenors.

The high note is not the only thing.

But I won’t deprive myself of singing opera as long as my voice follows.

The public made me and then encouraged me for many years, and my future even now depends upon it.

I feel like a little boy who is constantly offered new toys.

I then realized that I could never be satisfied again with the mere natural charm of my voice, that I had to constantly paint when singing, melting all the colors, expressing reds and blacks that had to be less primary but bursting with subtly colored combinations.

In the last century, everybody was singing lower.

The voice collects and translates your bad physical health, your emotional worries, your personal troubles.

When working with an orchestra, you never spend more than 20 minutes per recording session.

I feel at home in an orchestral score.

I was married at 16, a father at 17 and divorced at 18.

When facing symphonic orchestras which have played some works five thousands times, you have nothing to do.

This circus games aspect has existed since the beginning of my career.

We all have a destiny in accordance with the breadth of our shoulders. My shoulders are broad.

Let us be clear: I take ten times more money for a concert than for an opera performance.

The public is a part of my real life.

Between parts I was too old for and roles that were too overwhelming, out of reach then for my voice. I carved out a niche with the Wagnerian repertoire since I am attracted by its theatrical intensity.

When a young artist is ready, one has to bring him into the limelight.

Every three days on average, I am alone on stage, facing the public.

To stay at my best, I have to stop talking during the preceding day.

The atmosphere of the theater is my oxygen.