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Born: September 17, 1936 - Bochum, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Died: November 17, 2020 - Zürich, Switzerland |
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The German bass-baritone and singing pedagogue, Roland Hermann, attended the Universities of Freiburg im Bresgau, the Hochschule für Musik Mainz, and Musikhochschule Frankfurt am Main, and received his vocal training from Margarete von Winterfeldt, Paul Lohmann, and Flaminio Contini. In 1961 he took 1st prize in the ARD International Music Competition.
In 1967 Roland Hermann made his operatic debut as Count Almaviva in W.A. Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro at the Theater Trier; then joined the Opernhaus Zürich in 1968. He had guest engagements at the Bavarian State Opera and the Cologne Opera. He appeared at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires as Jochanaan in Richard Strauss' Salome in 1974, as Pollux in Rameau's Castor et Pollux at the Oper Frankfurt in 1980, as Golaud in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande at La Scala in Milan in 1986, and appeared also in Paris and Berlin, among others. His engagements as a soloist with orchestras and as a recitalist took him to many of the major music centres of Europe, the USA (debut with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1983), and the Far East. In addition to such operatic roles as the title role in Mozart's W.A. Mozart's Don Giovanni, Wolfram in R. Wagner's Tannhäuser, Verdi's La Traviata and Amfortas in Wagner's Parsifal, he sang in such rarely-performed works as Robert Schumann’s Genoveva, Marschner’s Der Vampyr, Ferruccio Busoni’s Doktor Faust, Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, and in Werner Egk's Peer Gynt. He also sang in several premiers, among them Keltenborn’s Der Kirschgarten (Zürich, 1984) and Höller’s Der Meister und Margarita (Paris 1989).
Roland Hermann held a professorship for singing at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe from 1989 to 2009. His class produced numerous national and international award winners. |
