Breaking: Four Met staff complain about Domingo

Further to our story earlier today, NPR says it has spoken to four employees at the Metropolitan Opera who are unhappy at having to work with Placido Domingo, following allegations of sexual harrassment As ever, the complaints are made anonymously:

...”Everybody knows that Domingo is a womanizer and that he could be persistent,” one of the Met employees, who has worked at the opera for decades, told NPR…. The same source also told NPR that there were a number of women at the Met who in the past have gone so far as to change their work schedules — denying themselves artistic and potentially career-furthering opportunities of working with the long-revered and influential singer — specifically to avoid having to interact with Domingo. “A lot of that stuff started happening in the 1980s,” this employee said. “As he got older, it was less of a big deal. But still, women knew.”

Another Met employee, a member of the orchestra, said that at least one person has already called in sick for rehearsals and performances of Macbeth to avoid working with Domingo, and said that they personally felt “livid” for having to perform alongside him. “I feel queasy in the pit during rehearsals, seeing him onstage,” the musician said. “Especially given that the Levine debacle is still so fresh, the Met had an even greater responsibility to show that it had evolved. Instead, here’s just one more catastrophic crisis — and it seems that at the Met, sufficiently powerful, popular men are beyond reproach.”

Read on here.

Domingo signing contract with Rudolf Bing

See also here.