He took acting as well as music lessons, a practice that is not all that common in opera. He joined the Berlin Staatsoper in 1988, while still a student. He grew up in Dresden, where he started singing at 10 with the famed Dresden Kreuzchor. I have been very careful, and very fortunate.” Pape already has been moving gingerly into both higher and heavier ranges, with plans to play Don Giovanninext year and Boris Godunov not too far in the future. “The bass voice grows until 40, maybe 42 then after that you can sing anything.” “As a bass, my voice is still changing,” he said recently between rehearsals at the War Memorial Opera House. Even at 37, he looks a decade younger, and, artistically, he is only beginning. ![]() He was, at 23, the youngest-ever Sarastro in the Salzburg Festival’s production of “The Magic Flute” led by his mentor, Sir Georg Solti, that launched Pape’s spectacular career. ![]() Well, the guy’s actually young, tall and slender, a hunk by opera standards. Pape recently made his San Francisco Opera debut as the venerable Old Hebrew in “Samson et Dalila,” and he is now getting ready to sing the role of Pogner, the heroine’s father in “Die Meistersinger.” He is very believable in these and other roles that he inhabits with precocious authority. Possessed of one of the richest and darkest instruments in opera today, the German bass is nearly always cast as the old guy, the heavy, definitely not the young lead. For anyone who has fallen under his spell onstage, meeting Rene Pape in person is quite a surprise.
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