Plácido Domingo

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• Top 6 Opera Singers of All Time

  Currently #3 · score 0

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• Luciano Pavarotti

  Luciano Pavarotti became one of the most commercially significant opera singers in history, and his participation in "The Three Tenors" concerts alongside Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, beginning in 1990, brought opera to a mainstream global television audience far larger than the genre had previously reached. His nine consecutive curtain calls following a 1972 performance of "Ah! mes amis" from Donizetti's La fille du régiment, a notoriously difficult aria containing nine high C notes, earned him a listing in Guinness World Records and cemented his reputation for that specific technical vocal feat. Pavarotti's warm, powerful tenor voice and his genuinely approachable, larger-than-life public persona made him the opera singer most recognizable to audiences with no particular prior interest in classical music, and his charity concerts raised substantial funds for humanitarian causes worldwide. His combination of genuine vocal technical mastery and his unprecedented mainstream crossover success has made Pavarotti the individual most responsible for opera's broader 20th-century popularization beyond its traditional dedicated audience.

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• Maria Callas

  Maria Callas is widely regarded as the most significant operatic soprano of the 20th century, and her combination of exceptional vocal range and genuinely committed dramatic acting ability transformed expectations for what operatic performance could achieve beyond pure vocal technique alone. Her technically demanding repertoire, including bel canto roles that had fallen out of common performance for decades before Callas revived them, played a significant role in restoring interest in that specific 19th-century operatic tradition among mid-20th-century audiences and performers. Callas's highly publicized personal life, including her relationship with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis before his marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy, made her one of the most prominent tabloid celebrities of her era well beyond opera's typically more insular audience. Her combination of genuine technical and dramatic innovation and her broader public celebrity has made Callas the soprano most universally cited as the greatest operatic performer of the modern era, and recordings of her performances remain foundational reference points for subsequent generations of opera singers.

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• Enrico Caruso

  Enrico Caruso became one of the first major recording artists in history, and his early 20th-century phonograph recordings, made when the technology was still commercially unproven, are widely credited with helping establish recorded music as a legitimate and commercially viable mainstream medium. His powerful, richly colored tenor voice made him the most celebrated opera singer of the early 20th century, and Caruso's regular performances at New York's Metropolitan Opera over nearly two decades established him as opera's first genuinely international recording-era celebrity. Caruso's commercial recording success generated substantial royalties that helped demonstrate to a skeptical music industry that recorded classical and operatic music could achieve genuine mass-market commercial viability, directly influencing the broader recording industry's subsequent investment in classical artists. His combination of genuine vocal artistry and his foundational role in establishing recorded music's commercial legitimacy has made Caruso one of the most historically significant figures in both opera and the broader development of the recording industry itself.

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• Renée Fleming

  Renée Fleming has become one of the most commercially and critically successful American sopranos of her generation, and her performance of the national anthem at Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014 made her the first opera singer to perform that role at the event, reflecting her unusual mainstream American recognition for a classical artist. Her combination of a warm, technically precise vocal tone and her willingness to cross over into popular and jazz-influenced recordings alongside her core operatic repertoire distinguished Fleming from more strictly traditionalist opera singers of her era. Fleming's advocacy for music's role in health and wellness, including her involvement in research examining music's neurological and therapeutic effects, has extended her public influence beyond performance into broader conversations about the arts and cognitive health. Her combination of sustained excellence at the Metropolitan Opera and her significant mainstream American crossover recognition has made Fleming one of the most publicly significant American opera singers of the past several decades.

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• Joan Sutherland

  Joan Sutherland, nicknamed "La Stupenda" by Italian audiences following a legendary 1960 Venice performance, is widely regarded as one of the greatest coloratura sopranos in opera history, known for exceptional vocal agility across the bel canto repertoire's most technically demanding passages. Her 1959 breakthrough performance in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at London's Royal Opera House is credited with sparking a broader mid-20th-century revival of interest in bel canto opera, a technically demanding early-19th-century Italian operatic style that had fallen into relative neglect. Sutherland's decades-long collaboration with her husband, conductor Richard Bonynge, who specifically championed and helped restore numerous obscure bel canto operas to the active performance repertoire, gave the couple significant combined influence over the operatic canon performed internationally during that era. Her combination of extraordinary vocal technique and her significant role in the broader bel canto revival has made Sutherland one of the most historically significant sopranos in 20th-century opera, and Australia continues to celebrate her as one of the country's most significant classical musicians.

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• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.