In the summer of 2022 the American singer Stephen Gould was undertaking not just one but three taxing heldentenor roles at the Bayreuth festival: Tannhäuser, Tristan and Siegfried (in Götterdämmerung) with characteristic dependability. Invited back to the festival the following year, he had just entered the rehearsal period when he had to withdraw on health grounds. A fortnight after announcing his diagnosis, he has died aged 61 of bile duct cancer.
Gould was renowned for his apparent tirelessness on stage: however demanding the role he always seemed to have fuel to spare in the tank. But no less remarkable was the fact that he made his effective operatic debut (discounting a brief spell with the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Centre for American Artists) as late as 2000, in his late 30s.
For 10 years prior to this he had been making his living as a cast member of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera on a long-running US tour: he sang neither the Phantom nor Raoul, he told interviewers, but “almost every other male role” in the musical.
Close study for a couple of years with the singer and voice teacher John Fiorito, who steered him towards the German repertory, persuaded him to undertake in 1999 an audition tour in Europe, as a result of which the Linz Opera in Austria offered him the role of Florestan in Fidelio, which opened the following January.
His first big Wagner role was Tannhäuser (Linz, 2002), an unusual place to start, as he later admitted, but he attributed his success with it to his intensive study with Fiorito and the thorough grounding offered by a provincial theatre such as Linz, with rehearsals over a period of months.
It was in the role of Tannhäuser that he made his successful Bayreuth debut in 2004, though when he returned in 2006 to do Siegfried he considered himself insufficiently prepared for the different demands it makes. He nevertheless appeared again in the role in 2007 and 2008 and then every year from 2015 until 2022 (except 2020 when the festival was suspended), in various roles.
His performances were characterised, at their best, by the baritonal heft of his voice, a robust but attractive tone and a thrillingly heroic delivery.
His working relationship with conductors could greatly affect the quality of tonal nuance: there was a marked improvement, for example, in his Bayreuth Tristan of 2016 over the previous year as a result of further sustained work on the part with Christian Thielemann.
Considering his regular Bayreuth successes (some 100 performances over a period of 19 years), his many appearances at the Vienna State Opera (more than 100 in a variety of roles) and his reputation as one of the world’s leading Wagner tenors, it is something of a mystery that Gould appeared only twice at the Met – once as Erik in a run of Der Fliegende Holländer and as a cover for the Götterdämmerung Siegfried – and twice at Covent Garden – as Paul in Die Tote Stadt in 2009 and in Christof Loy’s production of Tristan und Isolde in 2014).
Born in Roanoke, Virginia, he was the son of Loren Gould, a Nazarene minister in the Wesleyan Methodist tradition, and Annie (nee Brown), a concert pianist. He studied, initially as a baritone, at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston with John Moriarty, graduating in 1984.
As a member of the training programme at the Lyric Opera, Chicago, he got a break when he stood in at short notice for Chris Merritt in Rossini’s Tancredi at the Los Angeles Opera. According to contemporary accounts, he more than held his own in the big Act II duet with Marilyn Horne in the title role, but it was not repertory in which he felt comfortable. Hence his auditioning for Phantom of the Opera, which he did more or less on a whim, but with consequences for the following decade. In that time he calculated that he had given more than 3,000 performances in musical theatre, mostly in Phantom.
In a career that took him to Berlin, Florence, Valencia and Tokyo, among other places, he specialised in Wagner roles, also undertaking those of Lohengrin, Siegmund and Parsifal. Non-Wagnerian roles in which he appeared, in addition to Florestan, included Peter Grimes, Otello, Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos, the Emperor in Die Frau ohne Schatten and Aeneas in Les Troyens – all roles in which his powerful tone and stamina served him well.
On the concert platform he sang the bass solo in Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, Mahler’s Symphony No 8, Das Lied von der Erde and Gurrelieder.
He once said that Wagner’s work was “not entertainment: it’s a meditation – a mantra”. It’s arguable that this philosophical approach was in part responsible for the frequently noted lack of mobility in his stage presence, a failing that he was able to overcome with the help of strong dramaturgical input from a director he respected.
But it is a similar seriousness that characterises his penetrating thoughts on the major Wagner roles in a book, Performing Wagner, written with the assistance of F Peter Phillips, to be published next year. He speaks here on technical matters with the knowledge of one who has learnt from experience, advising singers of the need to “renew your own creative instincts again and again, while living with the voice in your body as it changes with time and circumstances”.
An artist of “irrepressible curiosity”, as Katharina Wagner, the director of the Bayreuth festival and a close friend, described him, he also offered valuable insights in the book into all the roles he sang. Tannhäuser, for example, he sees as on the road to “self-realisation”: it is “only through death that Tannhäuser’s soul and his circumstances will finally meet”.
His idea of Tannhäuser as a social rebel enabled him to respond with alacrity to the concept of Tobias Kratzer in his last and most successful assumption of the role (Bayreuth, 2019–22). Here the distressed minstrel, dressed as a clown, is seen as an anarchist, existing outside society alongside a dwarf and a drag queen, having abandoned social norms.
Gould had been looking forward, in his 60s, to developing roles, especially that of Tristan. It was not to be, but there is a satisfying sense in which his career as a Wagnerian came full circle with a spectacularly successful Tannhäuser, the work with which it was launched two decades earlier.
Gould is survived by his sister, Roxanne, and niece, Nyssa.
• Stephen Grady Gould, tenor, born 24 January 1962; died 19 September 2023
