In the summertime of 2022 the American singer Stephen Gould was enterprise not only one however three taxing heldentenor roles on the Bayreuth pageant: Tannhäuser, Tristan and Siegfried (in Götterdämmerung) with attribute dependability. Invited again to the pageant the next 12 months, he had simply entered the rehearsal interval when he needed to withdraw on well being grounds. A fortnight after saying his analysis, he has died aged 61 of bile duct most cancers.
Gould was famend for his obvious tirelessness on stage: nonetheless demanding the position he all the time appeared to have gasoline to spare within the tank. However no much less outstanding was the truth that he made his efficient operatic debut (discounting a quick spell with the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Centre for American Artists) as late as 2000, in his late 30s.
For 10 years previous to this he had been making his residing as a forged member of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera on a long-running US tour: he sang neither the Phantom nor Raoul, he instructed interviewers, however “virtually each different male position” within the musical.
Shut research for a few years with the singer and voice trainer John Fiorito, who steered him in the direction of the German repertory, persuaded him to undertake in 1999 an audition tour in Europe, on account of which the Linz Opera in Austria supplied him the position of Florestan in Fidelio, which opened the next January.
His first massive Wagner position was Tannhäuser (Linz, 2002), an uncommon place to start out, as he later admitted, however he attributed his success with it to his intensive research with Fiorito and the thorough grounding supplied by a provincial theatre reminiscent of Linz, with rehearsals over a interval of months.
It was within the position of Tannhäuser that he made his profitable Bayreuth debut in 2004, although when he returned in 2006 to do Siegfried he thought of himself insufficiently ready for the totally different calls for it makes. He however appeared once more within the position in 2007 and 2008 after which yearly from 2015 till 2022 (besides 2020 when the pageant was suspended), in numerous roles.
His performances had been characterised, at their greatest, by the baritonal heft of his voice, a strong however engaging tone and a thrillingly heroic supply.
His working relationship with conductors might drastically have an effect on the standard of tonal nuance: there was a marked enchancment, for instance, in his Bayreuth Tristan of 2016 over the earlier 12 months on account of additional sustained work on the half with Christian Thielemann.
Contemplating his common Bayreuth successes (some 100 performances over a interval of 19 years), his many appearances on the Vienna State Opera (greater than 100 in a wide range of roles) and his repute as one of many world’s main Wagner tenors, it’s one thing of a thriller that Gould appeared solely twice on the Met – as soon as as Erik in a run of Der Fliegende Holländer and as a canopy for the Götterdämmerung Siegfried – and twice at Covent Backyard – as Paul in Die Tote Stadt in 2009 and in Christof Loy’s manufacturing of Tristan und Isolde in 2014).
Born in Roanoke, Virginia, he was the son of Loren Gould, a Nazarene minister within the Wesleyan Methodist custom, and Annie (nee Brown), a live performance pianist. He studied, initially as a baritone, on the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston with John Moriarty, graduating in 1984.
As a member of the coaching programme on the Lyric Opera, Chicago, he obtained a break when he stood in at brief discover for Chris Merritt in Rossini’s Tancredi on the Los Angeles Opera. In accordance with modern accounts, he greater than held his personal within the massive Act II duet with Marilyn Horne within the title position, nevertheless it was not repertory through which he felt snug. Therefore his auditioning for Phantom of the Opera, which he did kind of on a whim, however with penalties for the next decade. In that point he calculated that he had given greater than 3,000 performances in musical theatre, principally in Phantom.
In a profession that took him to Berlin, Florence, Valencia and Tokyo, amongst different locations, he specialised in Wagner roles, additionally enterprise these of Lohengrin, Siegmund and Parsifal. Non-Wagnerian roles through which he appeared, along with Florestan, included Peter Grimes, Otello, Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos, the Emperor in Die Frau ohne Schatten and Aeneas in Les Troyens – all roles through which his highly effective tone and stamina served him properly.
On the live performance platform he sang the bass solo in Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, Mahler’s Symphony No 8, Das Lied von der Erde and Gurrelieder.
He as soon as mentioned that Wagner’s work was “not leisure: it’s a meditation – a mantra”. It’s controversial that this philosophical method was partly answerable for the continuously famous lack of mobility in his stage presence, a failing that he was in a position to overcome with the assistance of robust dramaturgical enter from a director he revered.
However it’s a comparable seriousness that characterises his penetrating ideas on the foremost Wagner roles in a e-book, Performing Wagner, written with the help of F Peter Phillips, to be printed subsequent 12 months. He speaks right here on technical issues with the data of 1 who has learnt from expertise, advising singers of the necessity to “renew your individual artistic instincts many times, whereas residing with the voice in your physique because it modifications with time and circumstances”.
An artist of “irrepressible curiosity”, as Katharina Wagner, the director of the Bayreuth pageant and an in depth pal, described him, he additionally supplied beneficial insights within the e-book into all of the roles he sang. Tannhäuser, for instance, he sees as on the highway to “self-realisation”: it’s “solely via demise that Tannhäuser’s soul and his circumstances will lastly meet”.
His concept of Tannhäuser as a social insurgent enabled him to reply with alacrity to the idea of Tobias Kratzer in his final and most profitable assumption of the position (Bayreuth, 2019–22). Right here the distressed minstrel, dressed as a clown, is seen as an anarchist, present exterior society alongside a dwarf and a drag queen, having deserted social norms.
Gould had been wanting ahead, in his 60s, to creating roles, particularly that of Tristan. It was to not be, however there’s a satisfying sense through which his profession as a Wagnerian got here full circle with a spectacularly profitable Tannhäuser, the work with which it was launched twenty years earlier.
Gould is survived by his sister, Roxanne, and niece, Nyssa.
