Sir Donald McIntyre (1934-2025)

The New Zealand bass-baritone Sir Donald McIntyre, who was a regular at the Bayreuth Festival for over two decades and triumphed as Wotan in the 1976 centenary production of the Ring Cycle, has died aged 91.

Born in 1934, McIntyre trained as a teacher in his native Auckland before relocating to London to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and made his professional debut with Welsh National Opera in 1959 as Zaccaria in Verdi’s Nabucco. He honed his craft over the next seven years as an ensemble member at Sadler’s Wells Opera, where his roles included Kaspar in Weber’s Der Freischütz, Verdi’s Attila, Guglielmo in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, and Pennyback in the first UK staging of Kurt Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall des Stadt Mahagonny.

In 1967 McIntyre debuted at both Covent Garden (as Pizarro in Beethoven’s Fidelio) and Bayreuth (as Telramund in Lohengrin, preserved and released on Orfeo). He would return to the ‘Green Hill’ virtually every summer over the next two decades, singing both Klingsor and Amfortas in Parsifal, the title-role in Der fliegende Holländer, Kurwenal in Tristan und Isolde, and of course Wotan/The Wanderer in Patrice Chereau’s landmark staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen (conducted by Pierre Boulez).

Known as the ‘Jahrhundertring’, it marked the hundredth birthday of the Festival as well as the hundredth anniversary of the Ring’s first complete performance – set during Wagner’s lifetime, Chereau’s production viewed the saga through the lens of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism, with McIntyre bringing great emotional commitment and nuance to Chereau’s deliberately banal vision of the king of the gods as a venal banker.

The production was filmed in 1980, again with McIntyre as Wotan/The Wanderer, and subsequently released on DVD and Blu-ray; a live audio recording was also made and issued by Philips, winning the GRAMMY Award for Best Opera Recording in 1982. McIntyre had previously sung Klingsor on the live Bayreuth recording of Parsifal from the 1970 Festival (also conducted by Boulez) and went on to record the role of Gurnemanz in the same opera for Reginald Goodall in 1984.

His small but distinguished discography also included Méphistophélès in Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust for Seiji Ozawa, Creon in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (opposite Sir Peter Pears in the title-role) for Sir Georg Solti, Golaud in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande for Boulez, and (perhaps more surprisingly) Handel’s Saul for Sir Charles Mackerras.

Although he never sang it at Bayreuth, McIntyre had considerable success as Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger in the later part of his career, performing the role at Zurich Opera House, in his native New Zealand, and at the Metropolitan Opera in the early 1990s. Reviewing one of his New York performances, the Los Angeles Times noted that ‘at 58, his voice shows some honorable signs of wear. He uses it, however, with extraordinary finesse over the very long haul, mustering incisive power for the aggressive outbursts and a fine-edged pianissimo, bordering on parlando, for the introspective passages.’

Beyond Wagner, McIntyre’s repertoire included a number of Strauss roles (Jokanaan in Salome, Orest in Elektra and Barak in Die Frau ohne Schatten), Nick Shadow in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, Shaklovity in Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, and Balstrode in Britten’s Peter Grimes. He also created the roles of The Stranger in Menotti’s 1964 chamber opera Martin’s Lie, Axel Heyst in Richard Rodney Bennett’s Victory (1970), and Prospero in Berio’s Un re in ascolto (1984).

McIntyre continued to sing Wotan until his early seventies, appearing in Longborough Festival Opera’s ‘baby Ring’ (using a chamber orchestration by Jonathan Dove) in 2004, and stepping in for an ailing Bryn Terfel at very short notice for a performance of Das Rheingold at Covent Garden in 2005 (when he sang the role from the pit, being unfamiliar with Keith Warner’s new staging). He made his final operatic appearances at the Staatsoper Berlin in 2016 as the Old Servant in Chereau’s staging of Strauss’s Elektra (a production which has seen the farewells of a number of great singers over the years, including McIntyre’s erstwhile Bayreuth colleague Waltraud Meier).

McIntyre was knighted in 1992 and mentored a number of Wagnerians of the next generation, including his compatriot Simon O’Neill and Welsh bass-baritone Jason Howard (who became a fine Wotan in his own right). In response to the news of his death in Munich on Thursday, the Bayreuth Festival paid tribute to his ‘combination of vocal power with deep psychological understanding’, whilst Covent Garden’s Director of Opera Oliver Mears described him as ‘one of the truly great bass baritones of the late twentieth century’.

Sir Donald McIntyre - a selected discography