Last night's opening was as ostentatious as ever, with tickets for the double bill of I Pagliacci and Cavelleria Rusticana and a post-performance banquet selling for up to $2,500 (£1,560). As at La Scala in Milan, the opening night is more of a glittering social occasion than an intentional artistic statement. Like Italian opera houses - but unlike London's Covent Garden or Coliseum - the Met makes a huge deal of its opening night performance. It is a compliment future singers may apply to Domingo himself. "What I still admire most about Caruso is the way he gave of himself so completely in his interpretation of everything he sang," Domingo wrote in his autobiography some years ago.
Last night was Domingo's 565th appearance at the Met (more than one in five of his 2,900 public performances have been given there). If that happens, he may get the chance to better another of Caruso's remarkable records - his 607 Met performances. The tenor, who is officially 58 years old, said he had no plans to stop at 18 nights, and was open to further offers as long as his voice stayed in good order. "But when I was in my eleventh or twelfth opening night somebody asked me, 'Do you realise how close you are to the number of times Caruso opened the Met season?' What can I tell you? I started to think maybe I can do it." The Spanish-born tenor first sang at the Met 31 years ago in 1968, and sang his first opening night in a 1971 performance of Verdi's Don Carlo.ĭomingo told the press last week that he had always assumed that Caruso's record would never be beaten. He has taken many more years than Caruso to get there. Now, with his eighteenth New York season opener, Domingo has set a mark that could last as long as the one he has just surpassed. The bass Ezio Pinza, with nine opening nights, was the only one to even get close to double figures. Until the Domingo era, no other singer had even got within touching distance of the Caruso record. That he sang them in the space of just 18 New York seasons from 1903 to 1920 is one of the reasons Caruso's fame lives on nearly 80 years after his death. Caruso's 17 opening nights at the Met had become a shorthand way of illustrating the great tenor's dominance of his era of operatic history.
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