The German baritone Matthias Goerne is one of the world’s most versatile and sought-after singers in his voice type. He appears regularly at leading concert halls and opera houses such as the Vienna and Bavarian State Operas, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, La Scala, Milan, the Paris Opéra, the Teatro Real in Madrid and the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, as well as at major festivals. He has worked with renowned conductors including Claudio Abbado, Herbert Blomstedt, Riccardo Chailly, Gustavo Dudamel, Paavo Järvi, Mariss Jansons, Andris Nelsons, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Seiji Ozawa, Kirill Petrenko, Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Franz Welser-Möst.
His operatic repertory ranges from major Wagner and Strauss roles to Bluebeard (Duke Bluebeard’s Castle) and the title role of Wozzeck. As an ambassador for German Lied, from Schubert to Brahms and from Berg to Eisler, Matthias Goerne has earned the highest reputation worldwide. He has given numerous world premieres of works by composers from Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Bernd Alois Zimmermann to Thomas Larcher.
In the 2025/26 season he has been artist in residence with the NDR Radiophilharmonie Orchestra. Recent highlights have included performances of Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam. Further engagements featuring Schubert’s works have taken him to the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden alongside Daniil Trifonov, as well as to the Berlin Konzerthaus and the Berlin State Opera with Markus Hinterhäuser. He also sang in Strauss’s Salome in Toulouse and Mendelssohn’s Elijah in Lisbon and performed under Manfred Honeck at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh.
His work has been documented on numerous recordings, many of which have won multiple awards and which have been nominated five times for the Grammy Awards. He released a recording of Beethoven songs with Jan Lisiecki in 2020, songs by Pfitzner, Strauss and Wagner with Seong-Jin Cho in 2021, and, in 2022, LIEDER with Daniil Trifonov, all on Deutsche Grammophon. His most recent recordings, Schubert Revisited and the Schumann album Zwielicht (the latter with Markus Hinterhäuser) were released in 2023 and 2026.
Matthias Goerne studied with Hans-Joachim Beyer in Leipzig, as well as with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He is an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London.
