Victor von Halem is a German operatic bass. He was a member of the Deutsche Oper Berlin for nearly 30 years as well as a guest singer in the major opera houses and festivals of Europe and North America. He sang a wide repertoire encompassing over 100 roles.
Life and career
Von Halem was born in Berlin but spent his childhood in Portugal and Italy. He studied singing at the Musikhochschule München under Else Domberger and made his stage debut in 1966 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. He remained a member of the company for the next 30 years singing many leading bass roles and appearing in the 1979 world premiere of Wilhelm Dieter Siebert's opera Der Untergang der Titanic. The New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg, who had seen von Halem in a 1975 performance of Boris Godunov at the Deutsche Oper described him as "a giant of a man with a voice to match." As a guest singer von Halem made his debut at the Vienna Staatsoper in 1978 as The Grand Inquisitor in Verdi's Don Carlos, a role he would reprise at San Francisco Opera in 1998 and the Paris Opera in 2010. He made his La Scala debut in 1994 as Hunding in Wagner's Die Walküre. His other Wagnerian roles included Gurnemanz in Parsifal, Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Hermann in Tannhäuser, the title role in The Flying Dutchman and Titurel in Parsifal.. Nigel Jamieson wrote of his role debut as Hans Sachs in The Times:
Victor von Halem was singing Hans Sachs for the first time but no-one could have guessed. He has everything the part demands: his warm, soft-grained bass flows easily through all Sachs's music, he points the words with a Lieder-singer's sensitivity, and his towering stature commands authority while conveying gentleness and humility. There is surely no finer Sachs today.
After his retirement from the Deutsche Oper company in 1995, von Hallen continued to sing as a guest performer at both the Deutsche Oper and the Berlin State Opera as well as in other German and foreign opera houses. In April 2016 the Senate of Berlin awarded him the title of Kammersänger for his life's work in the city's opera houses. In June of that year he appeared at the Renaissance-Theater in Berlin with Karan Armstrong, René Kollo, and Ute Walther in a production of Ronald Harwood's Quartet, a play about four opera singers living in a retirement home for musicians. Von Halem returned to the opera stage in 2017 as Orest's tutor in Elektra at Opéra de Lyon.
