Ernst Kraus (June 8, 1863 – September 5, 1941) was a German
dramatic tenor best known for his performances in the operas of
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most op ...
. He decided to embark on an operatic career when he heard leading singers performing in
Nuremberg. He studied voice first in
Milan with
Cesare Galliera and then in
Munich with
Anna Schimon-Regan.
Kraus debuted in
Mannheim as Tamino in ''
Die Zauberflöte'' on March 26, 1893. He first came to the
United States in 1894, where he was engaged as principal tenor of the
Damrosch Opera Company; he returned in 1895. He was appointed the leading tenor of the
Berlin Staatsoper
The (), also known as the Berlin State Opera (german: Staatsoper Berlin), is a listed building on Unter den Linden boulevard in the historic center of Berlin, Germany. The opera house was built by order of Prussian king Frederick the Great from ...
in 1896, holding that position for 27 continuous years. During this period, he distinguished himself in the German repertory. In 1901, he appeared at the
Bayreuth Festival
The Bayreuth Festival (german: link=no, Bayreuther Festspiele) is a music festival held annually in Bayreuth, Germany, at which performances of operas by the 19th-century German composer Richard Wagner are presented. Wagner himself conceived ...
as Siegmund in ''
Die Walküre'', the role in which he made his
New York
New York most commonly refers to:
* New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York
* New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States
New York may also refer to:
Film and television
* '' ...
Metropolitan Opera debut on November 25, 1903.
He retired from opera in 1924 in order to teach, and died in
Wörthsee,
Germany, in 1941. His voice was noted in his prime for its exceptional power and solidity rather than for its beauty or suavity of phrasing. It is preserved in several
cylinders
A cylinder (from ) has traditionally been a three-dimensional solid, one of the most basic of curvilinear geometric shapes. In elementary geometry, it is considered a prism with a circle as its base.
A cylinder may also be defined as an infini ...
recorded for
Thomas Edison's German branch between 1905 and 1910, among them "Am Stillen Herd" from ''Die Meistersinger'' (no. 15194) and "Liebeslied" from ''Die Walkure'' (no. 15256), as well as a number of acoustically recorded discs made prior to
World War I.
References
*David Ewen, ''Encyclopedia of the Opera: New Enlarged Edition''. New York; Hill and Wang, 1963.
*''The New York Times'', November 19, 1903: "More Opera Singers Here".
*Girard, Victor and Harold M. Barnes, ''Vertical-cut Cylinders and Discs.'' London: British Institute of Recorded Sound, 1964.
1863 births
1941 deaths
German operatic tenors
{{Germany-opera-singer-stub