David Steffens

German bass David Steffens grew up in Bad Reichenhall in Bavaria. He studied with Horiana Branisteanu at the Salzburg Mozarteum, where he also attended Wolfgang Holzmair’s lieder class. In 2011 he was awarded the Lilli Lehmann Medal as that year’s most outstanding graduate. He has also attended masterclasses with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Ruggero Raimondi, Christa Ludwig and Thomas Hampson. During the 2011/12 season he was a member of the International Opera Studio of the Zurich Opera and during the summer of 2012 took part in the Salzburg Festival’s Young Singers Project.

Since 2015/16 David Steffens has been a member of the Stuttgart State Opera, where his roles have included Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro), Sarastro (Die Zauberflöte), King Heinrich (Lohengrin) and Gremin (Eugene Onegin). More recently he has made three role debuts with the company: Oroveso (Norma), Escamillo (Carmen) and the King of Clubs (The Love for Three Oranges). Guest appearances have included Osmin (Die Entführung aus dem Serail) in a new production conducted by René Jacobs at the 2018 Mozartwoche Festival as well as at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein and in Lyon and Lausanne, the Commendatore (Don Giovanni) at the Dresden Semperoper, Baron Ochs (Der Rosenkavalier), Sarastro and King Heinrich in Chemnitz and Caspar (Der Freischütz) in Strasbourg and Karlsruhe. His most recent appearances in Salzburg were as the High Priest in Enescu’s Œdipe and the Fifth Jew (Salome) at the 2019 Festival. He has also been heard at the Teatro Real in Madrid, at the Vienna Volksoper, at the Teatro Verdi in Trieste, at the Prague National Theatre and at the St Gallen Theatre, where he returned in June 2021 as Quasimodo in Franz Schmidt’s Notre Dame.

Recent highlights of his work on the concert platform include appearances at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Herkulessaal in Munich and the Hohenems Schubertiade as well as the Pater Profundus in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal under Kent Nagano. He also appeared in a concert marking the centenary of the Great Hall of the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg.

Among the orchestras with which David Steffens has appeared are the Berlin Philharmonic, the MDR Symphony Orchestra of Leipzig, the Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra and the Akademie für Alte Musik in Berlin, while the conductors with whom he has worked include Simon Rattle, Zubin Mehta, Ingo Metzmacher, Ivor Bolton, Christoph von Dohnányi, Peter Schneider, Lothar Zagrosek and Franz Welser-Möst.