Without his Zarzuela past, the singer and musician Plácido Domingo would probably never have existed. It was precisely this Spanish special form of music theater that awakened his irrepressible love of music early on and taught him the ABC of stage practice: on tours across South America, as a participant in countless zarzuela productions by his parents, he experienced the excitement before the performance, the intoxicating exchange, from an early age with the audience, the fulfillment after the curtain falls, but also the countless larger and smaller stumbling blocks that can unexpectedly appear behind the scenes, the financial worries that spread in view of a sparsely filled auditorium, the troubles of everyday rehearsals. In this unique atmosphere which no theoretical instruction at a music institute can even begin to offer, Plácido Domingo was formed and ennobled as a stage person. Domingo had never before been seen in this genre at the Vienna State Opera, and so the circle seems to come full circle in a very harmonious way when, to a certain extent, he reflects on his roots and presents his own zarzuela program on this stage he loves so much.
