Editor’s note: A few weeks after announcing his retirement from the opera stage due to incurable bile duct cancer, tenor Stephen Gould died at the age of 61 on September 19, 2023. Gould met with VAN writer Volker Hagedorn in early 2019 while headlining “Tannhäuser” at the Dresden Semperoper. In honor of the singer, much-loved by audiences and colleagues alike, we’re offering that interview from the German archives, now translated into English.
“I first saw Stephen perform in 2015, in Katharina Wagner’s dubious staging of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ at Bayreuth,” Hagedorn recalls. “I’ve never seen another Tristan who was so human and who really loved Isolde.”
He wears heavy shoes with spikes so that he doesn’t slip on the slush in front of the Semperoper. A man of this size and with this important a job can’t afford a fall. Tall and broad, Stephen Gould is, like his voice, large. The technical term for his fach is Heldentenor: dramatic, massive, and German. Only a few singers have made an international career with this repertoire, singing the likes of Tannhäuser, Tristan, and Siegfried from Dresden to New York. Fewer still treat the texts of these Wagnerian heroes as sensitively as Gould does.