Born in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, on August 28, 1941, bass Paul Plishka's career includes 88 roles in 1672 performances with New York's Metropoiltan Opera. Originally from the Ukraine on his grandparents' side, his parents settled in Paterson, New Jersey, when he was sixteen, and he studied at Eastside High School. Noticed in a performance of Rodgers & Hammerstein's musical Oklahoma! he learned opera singing at Montclair State College with Armen Boyajian and made his Paterson Opera debut in 1961. Engaged for a Metropolitan Opera National Company tour in 1965, he joined New York's Metropolitan Opera in 1967, making his debut in Ponchielli's La Gioconda, with Renata Tebaldi, Rosalind Elias and Sherrill Milnes. He soon went on to play bass roles in Mozart, Verdi, Donizetti, Gounod, Beethoven, Saint-Saëns, Rossini, Bellini, Wagner, Puccini, Moussorgski, Massenet, Brittten, Dvořák, Smetana, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, and participated in famous recordings with Julius Rudel, James Levine, Alain Lombard, ThomasSchippers, Richard Bonynge, Zubin Mehta, Robert Shaw, Mstislav Rostropovitch or Riccardo Muti, in Verdi's La forza del destino in 1986. Retired from the Metropolitan Opera after forty-five years of loyal service, he gave his last performance in Tosca (Puccini) on January 28, 2012, before being invited back between 2016 and 2018. During his career, Paul Plishka also performed extensively in Europe, notably at La Scala in Milan, the Opéra de Paris, the Liceu in Barcelona, the Mai musical in Florence (1976) and the Salzburg Festival (1998). Inducted into the Hall of Fame for the Great American Opera Singers, he retired to Wilmington, North Carolina, where he died on February 3, 2025 at the age of 83.
