Samuel Ramey

Devils were the speciality — Boito's Mefistofele, Gounod's Méphistophélès, Berlioz's, and enough others to fill a touring concert programme he called A Date with the Devil. Ramey was born at Colby, Kansas, in 1942, trained at Kansas State and Wichita State, and began at New York City Opera in 1973 as Zuniga in Carmen. The Rossini revival of the following decades found in him exactly the dark, agile, flexible bass it needed, in the serious operas as much as the comic ones, and Handel and Mozart occupied the same part of his technique. His Metropolitan debut came in January 1984 in the title role of Handel's Rinaldo; La Scala, Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera, the Paris Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco and the Teatro Colón followed. Figaro, Leporello, Don Giovanni, Attila, Philip II, Boris Godunov, Bertram, Bluebeard and Nick Shadow mark the distance he could travel between the buffo and the monumental. He has taught as distinguished professor of opera at Wichita State University. Glyndebourne belongs to the same list of houses, and A Date with the Devil was recorded as well as toured.