Domingo returns to stage as Cyrano

After the longest absence from the opera stage in his career, three months, superstar tenor Placido Domingo donned the big nose of his character, Cyrano de Bergerac, to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

The 65-year-old tenor, who had nursed an inflamed windpipe all winter stepped onto the stage yesterday and into a challenge: a fiendish first aria, sung while duelling with a sword.

Many members of the audience held their breath for him as Cyrano forged on with My Sword Is Itching For Action!

By the end of Franco Alfano’s 1936 work Cyrano de Bergerac, everyone could breathe a sigh of relief along with Cyrano’s last gasp: a poetic soldier dying in the arms of his cousin, both proclaiming their undying love for each other.

It was a tour-de-force performance, except for a few strained moments, with Domingo’s voice seemingly reborn for a role that’s a kind of operatic mirror to Broadway’s The Elephant Man.

In this case, a homely man whose nose makes him feel he’s no match for a woman with “lovely eyes” writes her love letters, signed by the handsome fellow who marries her before he dies, during the 17th-century French war against Spain.

Only at the end of the opera, as Cyrano himself is dying, does he confess to his cousin that he penned the alluring, imaginative missives that seduced her.

Domingo won a standing ovation from an audience that had arrived wondering if he’d make it through the evening. He delivered with vocal and theatrical panache this fervent character whose foolish surface masks a tragic love.

In his more-than-four-decade career, the most time the tenor took off from singing in public was about 10 days.

He felt that he’d get “rusty” if he rested his voice too long. Apparently, that intensity has worked for an artist whose star power and musical prowess keep him on-stage at an age when most tenors quit.

Last Saturday, Domingo sang briefly at a New Orleans benefit, but that was hardly a test of endurance for a two-hour-plus work such as Cyrano.

Domingo had last appeared on the opera stage in December in Los Angeles, where tracheitis forced him to stop singing halfway through Wagner’s Parsifal.

He then cancelled a string of Met appearances in Cyrano and Saint-Saens’ Samson Et Dalila.

Domingo’s Met understudy for Cyrano, Antonio Barasorda, filled in with his own version of the nose, bigger and longer than Domingo’s.

Yesterday, the old nose appeared again, basically the shape of Domingo’s own, with a dramatic hump giving it heft.

It was a robust appendage to a performance that signalled Domingo’s return, at least for a while longer.