Obituary, Franz Mazura (1924-2020)

The Austrian bass-baritone Franz Mazura, who enjoyed a seven-decade career and was particularly acclaimed as Wagner’s villains, has died aged 95.

Mazura was born in Salzburg in 1924 and trained in Detmold, where he also worked as an actor alongside his vocal studies, beginning his opera career in the late 1940s at the Staatstheater Kassel and honing his craft at various smaller German houses before becoming an ensemble member at the Deutsche Oper in 1963.

He first sang at Bayreuth (as Gunther in Götterdämmerung) in 1971, and appeared frequently at the Festival until the mid-90s as Klingsor (Parsifal), The Wanderer (Siegfried), King Marke (Tristan und Isolde) and Alberich (Der Ring des Nibelungen). In 1980 he made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Dr Schön/Jack the Ripper in Berg’s Lulu (a role which he had sung at the world premiere of the completed version of the opera in Paris the previous year), and went on to notch up almost 200 performances at the house in roles including Alberich, Klingsor, Creon in Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, Mr. Flint in Billy Budd, and Pizarro in Fidelio. Though villains and schemers dominated his repertoire, he also enjoyed success as La Roche (Capriccio), Mozart’s Commendatore and Speaker of the Temple, and Gurnemanz in Parsifal. His discography includes Schön/The Ripper on Pierre Boulez’s triple-Grammy-winning recording of Lulu, Klingsor on CD and DVD from Bayreuth and the Metropolitan Opera respectively, and – perhaps more unexpectedly – the title-role in Handel’s Tamerlano for Ferdinand Leitner.

Mazura never retired and continued to expand his repertoire well into his nineties, creating the role of Abraham in Giorgio Battistelli’s Lot in 2017. His final performances were as the stocking-weaver Hans Schwarz in the Staatsoper Berlin’s production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg under Daniel Barenboim last April (where his distinguished fellow mastersingers included veteran heldentenor Siegfried Jerusalem, opposite whom he had appeared frequently at Bayreuth and the Met in the 1980s and 90s).

Franz Mazura - a selected discography