The son of singer Helmut Sieffert, German tenor Peter Seiffert was born in Düsseldorf on January 4, 1954, and joined a choir in his youth, before studying opera singing. After making his debut at the Rhine Opera in 1978, he joined the Berlin Opera Company, where he performed from 1980 to 2019. He has taken on a wide variety of roles, from Mozart to Richard Strauss, not forgetting Wagner, whose Ring tetralogy, recorded by Daniel Barenboim, is his specialty, among other productions over four decades. In 2003, his production of Tannhäuser, again conducted by Borenboim, won a Grammy Award. It was in this role of the minnersänger, performed many times, that the operatic tenor bade farewell after more than three hundred performances in Berlin. Peter Seiffert has also collaborated with other companies, including the Bavarian State Opera, the Vienna State Opera, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and the Bayreuth Festival, where he appeared regularly between 1996 and 2005. Married to Lucia Popp in 1986, then to Petra Maria Schnitzer in 1993, Peter Seiffert died after a long illness on April 14, 2025, at the age of 71.
