Thomas Hampson

Thomas Hampson arrived at singing sideways: a political-science student in eastern Washington who took his voice degree at Fort Wright College, spent two summers at the Music Academy of the West with Martial Singher, and then worked with Horst Günter in Los Angeles and, after the 1980 Merola programme, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in October 1986 as the Count in Le nozze di Figaro, and the Mozart and Verdi baritone parts — Don Giovanni, Posa, Germont — carried him on to Vienna, La Scala and Salzburg. Mahler took him further still: the Wunderhorn songs, the Rückert-Lieder and the Kindertotenlieder, performed and recorded with Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic at the end of the 1980s, remain the ground of his reputation, alongside a lifetime in the recital room. In 2003 he founded the Hampsong Foundation, whose Song of America project — developed with the Library of Congress and online since 2009 — has traced the American art song through recital, broadcast and teaching; since 2011 he has directed the Lied Academy at the Heidelberger Frühling festival. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and entered the Gramophone Hall of Fame in 2013. He sang with the Sofia Philharmonic in October 2021. More than eighty roles and some hundred and seventy albums stand behind him, with Grammy, Edison and Grand Prix du Disque awards among them, and he created Jan Vermeer in the first performance of Stefan Wirth's Girl with a Pearl Earring in Zurich. A Kammersänger of the Vienna State Opera and Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, he received the Hugo Wolf Medal together with Wolfram Rieger in 2017. He had sung with the Sofia Philharmonic once before, in May 2018.