Beautiful Singing, Hysterical Women

Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo: Part 3

A heads-up that this article contains stories of sexual abuse. Please take care while reading.

Welcome to Part 3 of Six Degrees of Plácido Domingo, where we’ll be exploring opera’s current #MeToo reckoning through four centuries of misogyny and misconduct in the genre’s history — onstage and off. While you don’t have to have read anything else before diving in here, you can catch up with Part 1 and Part 2 for full effect.

It’s the beginning of 1846, and Gaetano Donizetti is falling apart. Just over a decade after the composer cemented his reputation as one of his generation’s greatest composers with Lucia di Lammermoor, he was now in Paris, an orphan, a widower, and having outlived all of his children. His nephew, living in Turkey, was so concerned that he had three of Paris’s top specialists in “diseases of the mind” examine his uncle, including Dr. Jean Mitvie of the famed Salpêtrière Hospital (the same hospital that Princess Diana would be brought to roughly 150 years later after he…