A far cry from the twenties mastodons

Kid — star of the royal wedding.
My First Forty Years, by Placid° Domingo (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £9.95).
Kid, by David Fingleton (Arrow Books, £2.50).
NOTHING Like it had been seen since Callas's last Tosca. Not for 18 years had Covent Garden received such a deluge of ticket applications, as when they announced a new production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut for this April.
Without a London production for many years, the opera was to be conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli, music's latest mediahype wunderkind, while Piero Faggioni, recently acclaimed for his Fanciulla del West was announced as producer.
But the real cause of the scramble was the pairing in the leading roles of Placido Domingo and Dame Kin i te Kanawa, artistic giants in the operatic firmament and Covent Garden's favourite stars.
Domingo and Te Kanawa come close to the ideal in modern opera singers. Born with voices of remarkable and undeniable beauty, both are further blessed with cinematic good looks and dramatic intelligence — a far cry from the semaphoring mastodons of the twenties — which stand them in good stead in an era dominated by the producer and the dramatic legacy of Maria Callas.
Domingo made his Covent Garden debut in Tosca on December R 1971, just a week after Te Kanawa had shot to stardom .as the Countess in a new production of The Marriage of Figaro.
Since that mirabilis both artists have, almost without faltering, pursued ever .busier careers on stage and in the recording studio.
Kin i Te Kanawa's Christmas television shows and her performance at the royal wedding have made her a household name while, after more than a decade at the top of his profession, the 1980s have signalled the beginning of a golden age for Domingo: an extraordinary three years artistically, — epitomised by his London Otello with Carlos Kleiber, a remarkable recording of arias with Giulini and worldwide Hoffmans — in which his previous achievement, remarkable as it was, has been emphatically eclipsed. Both Kill and My First Forty Years are very up to date — each refers to the Covent Garden Manon Lescaut — and both are engagingly fluently written. There their similarities end.
Domingo's autobiOgraphy is a very personal story full of revelatory opinion, light philosophy, family life and quirky anecdote.
Kid is a short, straight, rather shallow account of the romantic tale of the adopted Maori girl with a beautiful soprano voice whose foster parents saw and encouraged her gift, who, after gaining early celebrity as a popular singer in New Zealand took Joan Sutherland's route to the London Opera Centre and Covent Garden, and who, following overnight success and a decade of public acclaim, has now joined Dames Joan and Edna on the roster of antipodean megastars.
Domingo's artistic integrity and his relaxed and genial dignity come through loud and clear in My First Forty Years. Some commentators have wondered how such an equable nature can be transformed into the tearing rage of Otcllo or Don Jose.
As this book reveals, the answer lies in Domingo's theatrical upbringing, which involved him at an early age with his parents' touring zarzuela group in Mexico.
Born to the stage and conditioned to its practices, he made his operatic debut when 18,
Always enjoyable, and often compulsive reading, My First Forty Years gives us the benefit of Domingo's experience without being hectoring or malicious, Louis Jebb