Christian Gerhaher studied medicine and singing and completed his training through masterclasses with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Inge Borkh. His close partnership with the pianist Gerold Huber developed during his student days. For more than thirty years they have set a golden standard of song interpretation and have been awarded numerous prizes.
Christian Gerhaher has worked with conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Herbert Blomstedt, Bernard Haitink, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Mariss Jansons, Andris Nelsons, Antonio Pappano, Kirill Petrenko, Simon Rattle and Christian Thielemann, appearing at the world’s leading concert halls. He works regularly with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Swedish and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestras, and is also a regular guest at the festivals of Aix-en-Provence, Edinburgh, Heidelberg, Lucerne, Salzburg and Schleswig-Holstein, and at the Rheingau Music Festival.
In 2024/25 he gave chamber music recitals with Tabea Zimmermann in Turin, Siena, Luxembourg and Munich, sang Kurwenal (Tristan und Isolde) in concert under Daniel Barenboim, and Amfortas (Parsifal) with the NHK Symphony Orchestra, and appeared with the Bamberg Symphony, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden and with Raphaël Pichon at Carnegie Hall.
His song recitals this season have focused entirely on the Lieder of Robert Schumann.
A much sought-after opera performer, he has been awarded the Laurence Olivier Award and the theatre prize Der Faust. His most important operatic roles include Posa (Don Carlo), Giorgio Germont (La traviata), Count Almaviva (Le nozze di Figaro), Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Don Giovanni, the title role in Henze’s Der Prinz von Homburg and Lenau in Holliger’s Lunea. He has sung his signature role of Wolfram (Tannhäuser) in Berlin, Vienna, London, Munich, at the Salzburg Easter Festival and at the Metropolitan Opera. His performance as Wozzeck at the Zurich Opera House was a career milestone. In 2024/25 he returned there as Simon Boccanegra and in the title role in Mendelssohn’s Elijah.
As an exclusive artist with Sony Music his recordings include song cycles by Schubert and Mahler with Gerold Huber. Their recording Robert Schumann: Alle Lieder was awarded an OPUS Klassik in 2022. Most recently he has recorded Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in the piano arrangement, and also published Lyrisches Tagebuch, a compendium of essays on Lied interpretation.
Christian Gerhaher is professor of Lied interpretation at the University of Music and Theatre in Munich and also teaches at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
