Singing actors on the opera stage are an exceedingly rare breed. The odds of an opera singer being able to act at all are naturally low – think of how many people you know who can act. Not many? Now how many of those happen to have the freakishly-shaped vocal chords that enable them to produce an inordinately beautiful sound. Even fewer (none?). Now consider how few people are blessed with the kind of voice that can be legitimately turned to a dizzying range of repertoire – Puccini, Massenet, Schubert, Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart, Richard Strauss. How many of those can act? We maybe have one or two at the highest level in every generation. Domingo has been the one for more years than anyone had a right to expect of him. And now, as that great man moves more and more to baritone roles and conducting, his true successor is Jonas Kaufmann.

The German tenor has always had an easy physicality on stage and a total commitment to, as that fine actor Mr. Thomas Cruise once said, “being in the moment”. But in the six or seven years since Kaufmann first burst through to prominence with...