What Placido Domingo’s friends tell him as he turns 80

The Spanish singer will turn 80 next week.

He has been on the cover of a couple of music monthlies and he’s spending this week, his social media says, at the Teatro Colon in Argentina.

But that’s about it.

The world of Placido Domingo has shrunk to matchbox size since multiple charges of sexual harrassment at Los Angeles Opera were found to be ‘credible’ by an independent legal investigation. Domingo has never been charged with a sexual offence and is free to come and go, but his career is over in the US, as well as in the UK, France and Germany.

He is still welcomed at Salzburg and Vienna, in some Italian houses and in the authoritarian states of Hungary and Russia. That’s the world of PD as he turns 80, and he is absolutely making the most of it, trumpeting every appearance as if he is the Placido Domingo of old.

With each social media post and Moscow TV appearance he chips away at the reputation of the great singer he once was, destroying both past and future in his reckless appetite for applause.

True friends would tell him to lie low for a couple of years. Say nothing, do nothing. Wait for the post-Covid resumption of normality and then reappear as the Grand Old Man he deserves to be.

But Placido won’t listen, can’t lie low. He’s hooked on attention, can’t bear to be ignored.

And so the tragedy continues of a great artist who was brought down in a bonfire of the vanities.

Happy birthday, Placido.