La Golondrina- Placido Domingo

            

 

Domingo was born on January 21, 1941 in the Retiro district section of Madrid, Spain,

and in 1949 moved to Mexico with his family, who ran a zarzuela company.

He studied piano at first privately and later at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City.

 

Domingo has sung 144 roles in Italian, French, German, English, Spanish and Russian.

His main repertoire however is Italian (Otello; Cavaradossi in Tosca; Don Carlo;

Des Grieux in Manon Lescaut, Dick Johnson in La fanciulla del West; Radames in Aida);

 French (Faust; Werther; Don José in Carmen; Samson in Samson and Delilah);

and German (Lohengrin, Parsifal, and Siegmund in Die Walküre).

 He continues to add more roles to his repertoire, most recently performing as

Francesco Foscari in the early Verdi opera The Two Foscari

 in September–October 2012.

 

 

La golondrina (Spanish: "The Swallow") is a song written in 1862 by Mexican physician

Narciso Serradell Sevilla (1843-1910), who at the time was exiled to France due to the

French interventioin Mexico. The Spanish lyrics uses the image of

a migrating swallow to envoke sentiments of longing for the homeland.

 It became the signature song of the exiled Mexicans.