Michael Nagl

Austrian bass Michael Nagl was born in Vienna and is making his Salzburg Festival debut this summer as Papageno (Die Zauberflöte).

Recent seasons have seen him making his debuts as the First Priest and Second Man in Armour (Die Zauberflöte) at the Paris Opéra, as Donner (Das Rheingold) at the Bregenz Festival, as Leporello (Don Giovanni) at the Opéra national du Rhin in Strasbourg, as Papageno at the Opéra national de Lorraine, as Count Ceprano (Rigoletto) at the Dresden State Opera and as the bass soloist in Stravinsky’s Pulcinella with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in the Berlin Philharmonie. He also has sung Polydorus/Le Père de famille in Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ with the Gürzenich Orchestra at the Cologne Cathedral and made his debut at the Musikverein Vienna in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

Michael Nagl was a member of the Opera Studio of the Stuttgart State Opera in 2016/17 before joining the company’s permanent ensemble at the start of 2018/19. Among his roles in Stuttgart have been Masetto (Don Giovanni), Leporello, Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro) and a Monk (Don Carlo). He has also given a lieder recital with Thomas Guggeis.

Plans for 2022/23 include his debut at the Theater an der Wien as Gobrias in Handel’s Belshazzar, while Stuttgart audiences will again hear him as Leporello and Figaro as well as Basilio (Il barbiere di Siviglia) and the bass soloist in a fully staged production of Bach’s St John Passion.

Michael Nagl received his musical training as an alto in the Mozart Boys’ Choir in Vienna, with whom he took part in numerous concert tours, allowing him to gain his earliest experience of some of Europe’s leading stages. He completed his vocal studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna in the summer of 2016. He had already made his stage debut in 2014 as Don Alfonso in a student production of Così fan tutte at the Schönbrunn Palace Theatre. He made his professional stage debut as the Second Man in Armour and as Leporello at the Baden Stadttheater in Lower Austria.

Michael Nagl won the Young Singers Prize at the International Otto Edelmann Competition in Vienna in the summer of 2014. In 2015 he was awarded the Gottlob Frick Medal at that year’s annual meeting of the Gottlob Frick Society. Among the conductors with whom Michael Nagl has already worked are Sylvain Cambreling, Marie Jacquot, Lothar Koenigs, Oksana Lyniv, Cornelius Meister, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, François-Xavier Roth, Marc Soustrot, Andreas Spering, Lorenzo Viotti and Bas Wiegers, while the directors in whose productions he has appeared include Lotte de Beer, Frank Castorf, Peter Konwitschny, Marie-Eve Signeyrole and Jossi Wieler.