José van Dam (1940-2026)

The elegant Belgian bass-baritone José van Dam, who created the title-role in Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise and excelled in a wide range of repertoire from Mozart to Wagner, died on Tuesday aged 85.

Born in Brussels in 1940, Joseph van Damme fell in love with music through listening to his mother’s record-collection and began his formal training at the Brussels Conservatoire aged seventeen, studying with the Belgian tenor Frédéric Anspach. Like his younger colleague Roberto Alagna (with whom he frequently recorded), he supported his studies by working as a nightclub-singer, an experience which honed his natural stage-presence and fostered a life-long love of popular song repertoire. He made his professional debut In Liège three years later, as Don Basilio in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, at which point he began using the name ‘José van Dam’.

The next five years were spent as an ensemble member at the Opéra de Paris, where he sang his first Escamillo (the role in which he would make his debuts at La Scala, Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera in the early 1970s). A spell in Geneva followed, which included the small role of Master Fal in the world premiere of Milhaud’s La Mère coupable; his performance attracted the attention of Lorin Maazel, who engaged him to sing Don Inigo on his studio recording of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole.

Maazel subsequently invited van Dam to perform at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where he had great success as Mozart’s Figaro and as Leporello in Don Giovanni; the house awarded him the title of Kammersänger in 1975. It was during his time in Berlin that van Dam came to the notice of Herbert von Karajan, who encouraged him to explore more dramatic roles. Van Dam remained circumspect, declining his offers of Telramund in Lohengrin and Pizarro in Fidelio, but taking on the role of Amfortas on Karajan’s 1980 studio recording of Parsifal (which was named as Gramophone’s Recording of the Year) – The Times’s William Mann observed that van Dam ‘voiced Amfortas’s self-pity with an eloquence which the character hardly deserves, with the top register of a hero’.

Wagner’s Dutchman also became a key role for van Dam, and in 1997 he sang Hans Sachs on Georg Solti’s GRAMMY-winning recording of Die Meistersinger (when Gramophone described his interpretation as ‘finely moulded from start to finish’). Other highlights from his vast discography include Barak on Solti’s 1989 recording of Die Frau ohne Schatten (another GRAMMY-winner), Philippe II in the five-act French version of Don Carlos for Antonio Pappano, Mozart’s Figaro for Neville Marriner, the four villains in Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, and the title-roles in Enescu’s Oedipe and Massenet’s Don Quichotte. The ‘knight of the doleful countenance' became van Dam’s signature role in his later years: in a post-retirement interview with former colleague Thomas Hampson, he described Quichotte as ‘a portrait of an artist, because he is generous in his spirit, as artists should be’.

A fine actor under the scrutiny of the camera, he also triumphed as Leporello in Joseph Losey’s 1979 film of Don Giovanni and took the lead role in Gérard Cobiau’s Oscar-nominated The Music Teacher, in which he played a star opera-singer who retires in his prime to mentor two promising students.

One of the crowning achievements of van Dam’s career was his creation of the title-role in Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise, which he sang at the long-awaited premiere in 1983 at the Opéra de Paris under Seiji Ozawa and reprised at the Salzburg Festival in 1992 and 1998. The latter performance was recorded and released the following year, when Gramophone described his interpretation as ‘a remarkable achievement for an artist on the cusp of his sixth decade’ and The New York Times hailed him as ‘superb, conveying the saint's grand calm and benevolence but intimating the nagging feeling of insufficiency that keeps him on his path’.

Shortly after giving those final Salzburg performances, van Dam was made a baron by King Albert II of Belgium, who engaged him to sing at the wedding of his son Prince Philippe (as he then was) the following year. Van Dam’s other awards and honours included the Gold Medal of the Belgian Press, the Orphée d'Or de l'Académie Lyrique Française, and the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik.

It was as Massenet’s Don Quichotte that van Dam eventually said farewell to the operatic stage in 2010, a full two decades later than he originally planned – in a 1981 interview with American journalist Bruce Duffie, he announced his intention to sing for ‘about ten more years’ before focusing squarely on teaching, but as things turned out the last two decades of his career saw much of his finest work.

Van Dam continued to sing regular recitals after his retirement from opera, often including some of the jazz standards and popular chansons which he had sung in his student days. From 2004 until 2023 he was Master in Residence at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Waterloo, Belgium, where he held the title of Master Emeritus for the rest of his life. The Chapel announced his death earlier this week, paying tribute to ‘a mentor, a father figure, and an inexhaustible source of artistic integrity’.

José van Dam - a selected discography