Thomas Hampson

Thomas Hampson, an American vocalist, rose to prominence as one of opera’s foremost figures beginning in the early 1990s and has since amassed more than two hundred recordings. His instrument is marked by a smooth, resilient timbre, an imposing upper register, and a commanding stage presence that prompted People magazine to include him among the world’s fifty most attractive individuals in 1993.

He entered the world on June 28, 1955, in Elkhart, Indiana, and spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington. Church singing with his two older sisters formed an early part of his musical life, yet his professional ambitions took time to clarify; he earned a government degree from Eastern Washington University while also completing vocal studies at Fort Wright College. Summer training at the Music Academy of the West under baritone Martial Singher, together with a second-place finish in the Metropolitan Opera’s Western Region auditions of 1980, helped steer his course. Hampson next traveled to Europe for further auditions, worked with contralto Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and joined the ensemble of Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf in 1981. Larger roles soon followed: he moved to the Zurich Opera in 1984, presented a Wigmore Hall recital that Schwarzkopf championed, made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Count Almaviva in 1986, and stood among opera’s brightest emerging talents by the close of the decade. Performances of major Mahler scores under Leonard Bernstein in the conductor’s final years further solidified his standing, an achievement underscored by the 1986 recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 in A minor with Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Since those years Hampson has appeared at virtually every leading opera house and concert venue. He has gravitated toward high-profile occasions, among them a 1991 Live from Lincoln Center broadcast of Copland’s Old American Songs with the New York Philharmonic and a 2009 recital at the Supreme Court of the United States attended by opera enthusiasts Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. He has also advanced new works, giving world premieres of operas by Richard Danielpour, Michael Daugherty, and others. His repertoire spans nearly one hundred operas across the genre’s entire history, and in middle age he added darker roles such as Amfortas in Wagner’s Parsifal and Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca. Mahler has remained a central focus, its broad yet lyrical demands suiting his voice ideally.

Hampson has cultivated a distinctly American artistic identity through performances of domestic repertoire, service on the faculty and board of the Manhattan School of Music, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. That year he also took part in the first classical-music broadcast on a streaming mobile application, leading a Mahler song master class at the Manhattan School of Music. Cross-genre projects have likewise appealed to him, including a 2012 CNN musical exchange with the South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Recording activity continued unabated into the late 2010s and early 2020s: he made his Cedille label debut in 2018 with the song recital Songs from Chicago. In 2023 he appeared on two releases, a Capriccio recording of Kurt Weill’s cantata Propheten and an Aparté album of Liszt orchestral songs.