Obituary: Wolfgang Fassler

Like many another heroic tenor, the Austrian singer Wolfgang Fassler started his career as a baritone, before becoming a stalwart interpreter of Wagner's Lohengrin, Tannhauser, Wal-ther, Tristan, Siegmund and the Gotterdammerung Siegfried, with which he made his Covent Garden debut in 1996.

His repertory also included such disparate tenor roles as Cavaradossi, Gounod's Faust, Hermann in The Queen of Spades, Samson, Florestan and Richard Strauss's Bacchus. He graduated from the smaller German opera houses to the larger European theatres in Zurich, Munich, Hamburg, Paris, Rome and Copenhagen. His career was still on an upward curve when it was cut short by his untimely death in a car accident.

Fassler was born in Vienna, where both his parents were connected with the musical theatre. He studied at the Vienna Music High School, first piano and double bass, then singing, as a baritone. In 1970 he appeared with the Vienna Chamber Opera as Figaro in Paisiello's Il barbiere di Siviglia. Deciding to retrain as a tenor, he went to Zurich, where he worked at the Opera Studio.

His first engagement was at Saarbrucken, where in 1973 he sang Malcho in Daisi ("Twilight"), by the Georgian composer Zakhary Paliashwili, and in 1974 Tchekalinksy in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades. Moving to Wuppertal, where he studied with Reinhard Becker, he sang Gounod's Faust, playing the character, according to one report, as "an ancestor to Bram Stoker's Dracula".

Tall and good-looking, Fassler made an excellent Barinkay in Johann Strauss's Der Zigeunerbargon at the 1982 Bregenz Festival. The same year he sang Matteo in Richard Strauss's Arabella in Lisbon, repeating the role in 1983 in Hamburg. Also in 1983 he sang Luzio in Wagner's second opera, Das Liebes-verbot, based on Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure, at the Munich Festival.

Now ready to attempt the heroic tenor repertory, in 1984 he sang Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos in Liege, and Lohengrin at Bremen, making "a magnificently dumb Knight of the Grail in a capacious sky-blue towelling suit which displayed his hairy chest". In Bremen he also scored a great success as Jimmy Mahoney in Kurt Weill's Aufslieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny.

The very high tenor role of Mephistopheles in Busoni's Doktor Faustus, which Fassler sang in Bologna in 1985, was followed by a similar part, Cardinal Albrech von Brandenburg, in Hindemith's Mathis der Maler at Zurich, a performance I found most compelling. As a member of the Zurich Opera (1985-88), he also sang Walther von Stolzing in Die Meistersinger, Florestan in Fidelio, and Siegmund in Die Walkure. In Florence he sang Tristan in a production of Tristan und Isolde (1988) staged by Jonathan Miller.

After Bacchus in Rome (1991), Fassler sang Parsifal at Essen, where he repeated Tristan in a production by Wolf Siegfried Wagner, the son of Wieland. He made his American debut in March 1995 at Baltimore as Samson in Samson et Dalila, then sang Siegfried in Gotterdammerung that autumn in Seattle. He made his Covent Garden debut as Siegfried in March 1996, returning for one performance in November.

Elizabeth Forbes

Wolfgang Fassler, tenor: born Vienna 9 March 1944; died 24 June 1997.