Peter Seiffert, a German tenor admired for his clear, powerful renditions of Wagner, died on April 14 at his home in Schleedorf, Austria, near Salzburg. He was 71.
His death was announced by his agent, Hilbert Artists Management, which didn’t specify a cause but said that Mr. Seiffert had suffered from a “severe illness.”
Mr. Seiffert was the archetype “heldentenor,” or heroic tenor in German, one of the rarest and most sought-after types of voices in opera. The leading roles in much of Wagner’s work — Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan, Parsifal — demand big tenor voices of exceptional strength and stamina, able to withstand the most extreme vocal demands over hourslong performances.
Wagner himself wanted a tenor that was the opposite of what he had been hearing in the Italian opera of his day, which he considered “unmanly, soft and completely lacking in energy,” he wrote in an essay on the performing of the opera “Tannhäuser.”
Mr. Seiffert had the sort of voice that Wagner sought, in the view of critics: It projected strength. Over the nearly five hours of “Tannhäuser,” his voice rang out clear and true, from the bottom of his range to the top. The effort was intense.
“You don’t become the knight of the High C just for fun and games,” he told the online magazine Backstage Classical in 1996.
Mr. Seiffert had already been singing Wagner for more than a decade — he made his debut in “Parsifal” in 1988, at the Royal Opera House in London — when he became the leading Tannhäuser of his era. With Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin, he won a Grammy Award for the 2002 recording of the opera.
“Seiffert is probably its most telling exponent today,” the critic Alan Blyth wrote in Gramophone magazine that year, referring to “Tannhäuser,” “and proves the point in a performance that combines vocal assurance and emotional involvement to create a vivid portrait of the hero torn between sacred and profane love.”
Mr. Seiffert’s belated debut at the Metropolitan Opera two years later, in “Tannhäuser” — he had already been a mainstay of the European stage for two decades — was a critical success.
“Mr. Seiffert has plenty of Wagnerian power and, rarer, a true tenorial cast to his sound,” Anthony Tommasini wrote in The New York Times.
“Not many singers with such weighty vocal heft are also as technically agile as Mr. Seiffert, especially in his high range,” he continued. “Though he has a barrel-chested physique to match his hefty voice, he proved a physically nimble, imposing and charismatic Tannhäuser.”
A return to the Met for “Tristan und Isolde” in 2008 received a more mixed reception, with Mr. Tommasini questioning “a leathery quality to his midrange singing” and Mr. Seiffert’s use of an earpiece for prompts in the second and third acts of the opera.
“But he certainly sang with fierce intensity in Tristan’s final scene,” Mr. Tommasini wrote. “The role is endless and difficult, and Mr. Seiffert has more work to do, it would seem.”
In interviews, Mr. Seiffert readily admitted the difficulties of singing Wagner.
“Wagner needs legato singing,” he said in the 1996 interview. “Where it’s missing, the brilliance is suddenly gone, the youthful power is gone, and in the end you hear only wrecks.”
Peter Seiffert was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, on Jan. 4, 1954, the son of Helmut Seiffert, an opera singer and composer of light ballads. “For as long as I can remember, there was a lot of music at home,” Mr. Seiffert said in the 1996 interview. “I was in the boys’ choir and was allowed to sing in the opera back then.”
He studied at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf and made his professional operatic debut in Aribert Reimann’s “Lear” at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein. He joined the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1980, singing the roles of Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” and Huon in Carl Maria von Weber’s “Oberon.”
Under the direction of Wolfgang Sawallisch, Mr. Seiffert sang the role of Lohengrin in 1989. It was a role he would reprise many times over the years, and represented his breakthrough to international stardom. He would go on to sing Verdi, Mozart, Florestan in Beethoven’s “Fidelio” under Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and others in the major European opera houses.
He became a familiar presence at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, Germany, singing in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” and “Lohengrin” there for nearly a decade, starting in the mid-1990s.
Mr. Seiffert is survived by his wife, the soprano Petra-Maria Schnitzer, and three children. He was previously married to the soprano Lucia Popp, who died in 1993.
Known for his easygoing charm, Mr. Seiffert had a rather unexalted, though perhaps realistic, view of the business he was in, and the way critics perceived it.
“The productions are described at length, the singers dismissed in a lumpen pile, despite months of rehearsals, day and night, Sundays and holidays, sometimes in a terrible mood,” he said in the 1996 interview. “Most directors today no longer even consider that a singer is not a machine.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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