Goya: A Life in Song is a musical theatre

Musical theatre

Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...

 work with music and lyrics by American composer Maury Yeston

Maury Yeston

Maury Yeston is an American composer, lyricist, educator and musicologist.He is known for writing the music and lyrics to Broadway musicals, including Nine in 1982, and Titanic in 1997, both of which won Tony Awards for best musical and best score. He also won a Drama Desk Award for Nine...

 originally released in 1988 as a concept album

Concept album

In music, a concept album is an album that is "unified by a theme, which can be instrumental, compositional, narrative, or lyrical." Commonly, concept albums tend to incorporate preconceived musical or lyrical ideas rather than being improvised or composed in the studio, with all songs contributing...

.

Tenor

Tenor

The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2...

 Plácido Domingo

Plácido Domingo

Plácido Domingo KBE , born José Plácido Domingo Embil, is a Spanish tenor and conductor known for his versatile and strong voice, possessing a ringing and dramatic tone throughout its range...

 was interested in starring in a stage musical about Spanish painter Francisco de Goya and suggested to producer Alan Carr that Yeston would be the right person to create the vehicle, since Domingo had admired Yeston's work on the musical Nine

Nine (musical)

Nine is a musical with a book by Arthur Kopit, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston. The story is based on Federico Fellini's semi-autobiographical film 8½...

. Because of Domingo's time commitments, however, the musical was made recorded as a concept album.

Domingo sang the role of Goya, with Jennifer Rush

Jennifer Rush

Jennifer Rush is an American/German-based pop/rock singer, best known for the million-selling single "The Power of Love", which she co-wrote and which went on to be covered by Laura Branigan and Celine Dion.-Career:...

, Gloria Estefan

Gloria Estefan

Gloria María Milagrosa Fajardo García de Estefan; known professionally as Gloria Estefan is a Cuban-born American singer, songwriter, and actress. Known as the "Queen Of Latin Pop", she is in the top 100 best selling music artists with over 100 million albums sold worldwide, 31.5 million of those...

, Joseph Cerisano, Dionne Warwick

Dionne Warwick

Dionne Warwick is an American singer, actress and TV show host, who became a United Nations Global Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization, and a United States Ambassador of Health....

, Richie Havens

Richie Havens

Richard P. "Richie" Havens is an African American folk singer and guitarist. He is best known for his intense, rhythmic guitar style , soulful covers of pop and folk songs, and his opening performance at the 1969 Woodstock Festival.-Career:Born in Brooklyn, Havens was the eldest of nine children...

, and Seiko Matsuda

Seiko Matsuda

is a Japanese pop singer-songwriter. Due to her popularity in the 1980s and her long career, she has been dubbed the "Eternal idol" by the Japanese media.- Biography :...

 singing supporting roles. the recording was released by CBS/Sony (483294-2). The score featured one break-out song, “Till I Loved You,” sung by Domingo and Rush. It was subsequently a Top 40 hit by Barbra Streisand

Barbra Streisand

Barbra Joan Streisand is an American singer, actress, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, four Emmy Awards, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy,...

. In spite of that commercial success, the piece has not received a major staging.

However, not available for nearly 20 years, Masterworks Broadway will release a digital remastered version of the Placido Domingo, et al GOYA concept album on September 28, 2010.