Markus Schäfer

Lyric tenor Markus Schäfer maintains a strong association with Baroque repertoire while maintaining an active presence in lieder and extending his reach through 19th-century works up to Mahler. He also maintains a parallel role as an educator.

Born on June 13, 1961, in Andernach in western Germany, Schäfer spent his childhood in nearby Bad Ems, where his father served as a church musician. Initially pursuing a clerical path, he trained in church music at institutions in Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf, yet sessions with Armand McLane redirected his focus to performance, reinforced by time spent at the International Opera Studio in Zürich. There he took part in staged productions before becoming a regular member of the Zürich Opera ensemble. Subsequent engagements took him to the Hamburg Staatsoper and then to the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf. Parallel to these operatic commitments, he cultivated a lieder career that included regular appearances at summer festivals as well as recitals at Lincoln Center in New York and Wigmore Hall in London. Over time his interests shifted decisively toward early music; he performed both concert and operatic works with La Petite Band under Sigiswald Kuijken and participated in a 2014 tercentenary presentation of C.P.E. Bach’s oratorio Die Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt Jesu with Das kleine Konzert and the Rheinische Kantorei. He has frequently appeared as soloist with the Windsbacher Knabenchor and belongs to the male vocal quartet Liedertafel.

Several distinguished recordings feature Schäfer as soloist, among them Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s Grammy Award-winning 1994 account of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244. As a recitalist he has issued discs on Naxos, Wergo, and Avi-Music, including the 2019 Schubert collection Schwanengesänge on the latter label. In 2020 he took part in a Naxos recording of Johann Simon Mayr’s seldom-heard opera Le due duchesse. Schäfer holds a professorship in voice at the Musikhochschule Hannover.