Siegfried Lorenz, who has died aged 78, was an intelligent and refined German baritone with a warm and pleasing voice whose career fell under the shadow of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the pre-eminent lieder singer of the postwar years; his visits to this country were few, though he was known to aficionados through his recordings and radio broadcasts.
He sang Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen under Kurt Masur on the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s 1977 tour of Britain; appeared in a concert performance of Act II of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the 1983 Edinburgh Festival with Rosalind Plowright and Siegfried Jerusalem; and was accompanied by Iain Burnside in a lieder recital at the Purcell Room in 1992.
Earlier he had performed the Mahler in the US, when he accompanied Masur and the Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1974 on the first visit to that country by an East German orchestra. Harold Schonberg wrote of him in the New York Times: “He has a good-sized voice that is used with impeccable taste, the smoothest of legatos, flawless diction and intense musicianship. Quite a package.”
Lorenz’s strength, however, lay in his sublime interpretation of Schubert songs, despite the inevitable comparisons with Fischer-Dieskau. Gramophone magazine noted that his voice, although “not so large as his predecessor’s”, had “the same range and scrupulous control of dynamics”.
Siegfried Lorenz was born in East Berlin on August 30 1945. After early studies in piano, organ and cello he took vocal lessons with the tenor Alois Orth at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin. He joined the Komische Oper, Berlin, in 1969, making his debut in Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges. Four years later Masur created the post of “first vocal soloist” for him at the Gewandhaus Orchestra.
Lorenz came to international attention as a finalist in the 1973 International Voice Competition at the Maisonneuve Theatre in Montreal. Three years later he sang Schubert’s Die Winterreise at the Alice Tully Hall, New York, in what the city’s Daily News described as a “freakishly effortless” performance.
By then commentators were making comparisons not only with Fischer-Dieskau but also with Hermann Prey, another gifted German interpreter of Schubert. Arguably Lorenz was more his own man in the music of Bach, several of whose cantatas he recorded with the tenor-turned-conductor Peter Schreier.
Back in Berlin he joined the Staatsoper in 1978, his debut being as Wolfram in Wagner’s Tannhäuser, with Opera magazine describing him as “a warm, slightly thrustier than lyric baritone with a most pleasing timbre and fine... phrasing”.
He also appeared in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Verdi’s Don Carlos and Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide, the latter drawing an approving review in 1988 for the way in which he “movingly depicted Agamemnon’s inner conflict”.
His Schubert recordings, made in the former East Germany, were much sought-after by connoisseurs, though never easy to find. The writer Leo Black, who for many years campaigned in vain to introduce Lorenz to the Wigmore Hall, reported in Franz Schubert: Music and Belief (2003) how they “had to be winkled out of the bottom drawer at post-reunification German record shops as if they were impacted wisdom teeth”.
Eventually Lorenz’s position at the Staatsoper became a victim of post-reunification budget cuts. “We are being dumped like over-ripe fruit,” he told Der Spiegel angrily when he was among several soloists whose contracts were not renewed in 1991.
Thereafter he shunned the limelight, living modestly in the eastern part of Berlin, teaching singers at the University of the Arts and making only rare professional appearances.
Siegfried Lorenz, born August 30 1945, died August 24 2024
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