Peter Seiffert (1954-2025)

The German tenor Peter Seiffert, an acclaimed Wagnerian who was a regular fixture at the Bayreuth Festival in the late 1990s and early 2000s, has died after a long illness at the age of 71.

Born in Düsseldorf in 1954, Seiffert received his first voice lessons from his father Helmut (an opera singer and composer of popular music), and sang as a boy chorister before going on to study at the Musikhochschule in his hometown. He joined the ensemble of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in 1978, making his professional debut in Aribert Reimann’s new opera Lear, and transferred to the Deutsche Oper Berlin several years later. By the mid-1980s he had also given his first performances at the Wiener Staatsoper and Bayerische Staatsoper, and married the Slovak soprano Lucia Popp; the pair would subsequently appear together in Lohengrin (one of Popp’s rare excursions into Wagner), and as the Eisensteins on Plácido Domingo’s studio recording of Die Fledermaus.

For the early part of his career Seiffert concentrated on essentially lyric roles such as Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Narraboth in Strauss’s Salome, and Fenton in both Verdi’s Falstaff and Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor; his early discography includes Rinuccio in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi for Giuseppe Patanè, Matteo on Jeffrey Tate’s recording of Strauss’s Arabella (with Kiri Te Kanawa in the title-role), and Froh on Bernard Haitink’s 1988 account of Wagner’s Das Rheingold.

It was under Haitink that Seiffert made his debut in a major Wagner role, singing Parsifal at Covent Garden in 1988; two years later he sang his first Lohengrin, which was ideally suited to his relatively bright, almost Italianate timbre and quickly became his signature role. Although Seiffert found himself in great international demand for Wagner’s more lyrical heroes in the early 1990s, he continued to sing Mozart roles such as Tamino and Tito alongside these heavier assignments, and bided his time before taking on Tristan, Siegmund and Tannhäuser (which would come to feature prominently in the later part of his career).

In 1996 Seiffert made his debut at the Bayreuth Festival, as Walther in Die Meistersinger, and notched up more than a hundred performances on the ‘green hill’ over the course of the next decade (including four seasons as Lohengrin). He collaborated regularly with Daniel Barenboim on stage and in the studio, including on recordings of Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger and Tannhäuser; the latter won the Grammy for Best Opera Recording in 2003, with Gramophone describing Seiffert as ‘probably the most telling exponent’ of the taxing title-role thanks to his combination of ‘vocal assurance and emotional involvement’.

Seiffert’s discography also included recordings of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (with Thomas Hampson, Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra), Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and Lieder by Clara and Robert Schumann with his second wife Petra-Maria Schnitzer (the Austrian dramatic soprano whom he married several years after Popp’s death in 1993, and with whom he often appeared in Wagner).

Seiffert’s awards and honours included ECHO Klassik’s Singer of the Year prize in 1989, the title of Bayerischer Kammersänger (bestowed upon him in 1992), and the Académie Charles Cros’s Grand Prix du Disque in 2002 (also for the recording of Tannhäuser with Barenboim). He died near Salzburg on 14th April, surrounded by his family; in a statement this morning, the Bayreuth Festival paid tribute to ‘a very simple, very entertaining and generous person, who will be greatly missed.’

Peter Seiffert - a selected discography