Plácido Domingo had just turned twenty-six when Rudolf Bing, the Met’s then general manager, invited him to audition in 1967. The young Domingo chose Enzo’s aria from La Gioconda, “Cielo e mar”, as his audition piece. Only a short time later, on the very day on which he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera as Verdi’s Don Carlos, he received a telegram from Bing, asking him to sing Maurizio in Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur on 2 October 1968. For every singer, calm, concentration and, above all, ample time to prepare are indispensably necessary before they appear on stage. None of these prerequisites was to be granted to Plácido Domingo before his important first appearance at the Met. On the afternoon of 28 September 1968, four days before his planned debut — he had just completed an extra rehearsal of Turandot at the Met as well as appearing in several performances at the New York City Opera in the course of the previous days — Bing telephoned Domingo and told him to report to the Met at once in order to take over from an indisposed Franco Corelli as Maurizio in Adriana Lecouvreur. The performance was about to begin. In short, Domingo had no time to prepare for such a major event or even to get nervous. He had to jump straight into a car, drive at high speed through New York’s notoriously dense traffic and do vocal exercises at the steering wheel. Although the performance began twenty minutes late, Domingo’s premature Met debut still proved a triumphant success. Only a few weeks before his legendary debut at the Met, another important event in Domingo’s career had taken place in the Great Banqueting Hall at the Johannesstift at Spandau in Berlin, where Teldec recorded the young tenor’s first solo recital. A unique historical document, this recital is here re-released.