Los Angeles.(The Merry Widow)

January's entry on the Los Angeles Opera schedule originally called for three performances of a Spanish-language version of Lehar's The Merry Widow, to follow the English-language production that -- as fate would have it -- had thudded across the Music Center stage the month before. As the better part of valor, La Viuda Alegre gave way instead to a concert program of zarzuela excerpts -- which, in turn, gave way to a one-shot half-zarzuela, half-Viennese-operetta evening (Jan. 8). Some of the Widow's English-language cast, who had also been scheduled for the Spanish version, now found themselves singing Lehar's bits and pieces in the original German. Never question the inscrutability of opera and its world.

For all its logistic and linguistic ups and downs, one consistent element guaranteed a full and demonstrative house. Despite recent reports of small, health- and voice-threatening episodes, L.A.O.'s artistic director and supertenor Placido Domingo, mere days short of his sixty-first birthday, sang his way through a zippy bilingual program, and the years fell away. The Spanish repertory -- songs by Torroba de Zorozabel and a steamy duet from Penella's El Gato Montes, which he had sung complete in Los Angeles in 1994 -- was, of course, his birthright since his apprentice days with his parents' zarzuela company in Mexico. The grace and the earnestness of his ...