Obituary, Stephen Gould (1962-2023)

The American heldentenor Stephen Gould has died aged 61, just weeks after announcing that he had been diagnosed with incurable bile-duct cancer.

The son of a Baptist minister and a pianist, Gould was born in Virginia in 1962. His early love of music was fostered by singing in church with his family and listening to his mother’s collection of operetta recordings; his first singing-teacher introduced him to Gilbert & Sullivan, and he made his stage debut as one of King Gama’s three muscle-bound sons in the duo’s Princess Ida whilst still in his teens.

Gould initially trained as a baritone at the Olivet Nazarene University before enrolling at the Lyric Opera of Chicago Centre for American Artists, where he attempted a transition into the heavier bel canto tenor repertoire – one early-career highlight included replacing an ailing Chris Merritt as Argirio in Rossini’s Tancredi (opposite Marilyn Horne in the title-role) in 1989. Still feeling that his technique was too unsettled to pursue an operatic career, he auditioned on a whim for a Chicago production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera and spent the next seven years performing the smaller roles in the show, notching up several thousand performances in musical theatre during his twenties and thirties.

Gould was on the verge of retiring from performing altogether when he began studying with the renowned baritone and singing-teacher John Fiorito, who encouraged him to set aside a couple of years to completely rework his technique with a view to moving into heldentenor repertoire. After several years of working a day-job outside the music industry alongside his studies with Fiorito, a run of auditions in Europe led to a contract with the Landestheater Linz, where he made his debut as Florestan in Beethoven’s Fidelio in 2000.

In a 2009 interview with MusicWeb International Gould described the house as ‘a great training-ground’ for heavier roles due to its relatively small size, and it was at Linz that he came to the attention of the Wagner family in a production of Tannhäuser; Wolfgang Wagner (who became a beloved mentor) invited him to sing the role at the 2004 Bayreuth Festival, which prompted The New Yorker’s Alex Ross to declare that ‘the young American tenor has a powerful, flexible, beautiful voice, and, wonder of wonders, he is a charismatic actor’.

Gould would become a regular fixture on the ‘Green Hill’ over the next two decades, notching up over a hundred performances at the Festival: in addition to Tannhäuser, he also took on Siegfried (from 2006) and Tristan (from 2015), performing all three enormously taxing roles in the 2022 season. His discography includes a live recording of Der Ring des Nibelungen (as Siegfried) from the 2008 Bayreuth Festival with Christian Thielemann, with whom he also recorded Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder, Siegmund in Act One of Die Walküre and Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten: the latter recording was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award in 2020. He also sang the title-role on Marek Janowski’s studio recording of Siegfried on Pentatone, and Tristan in the same series - a performance which was described as ‘tireless and touching’ by The Sunday Times.

Beyond his international career in Wagner, Gould’s repertoire included Britten’s Peter Grimes in Saxony and Geneva, Verdi’s Otello in Tokyo, Bacchus in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, Berlioz’s Enée (Les Troyens) in Valencia, and Paul in the Covent Garden premiere of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt in 2009; his operatic wish-list also included Captain Vere in Britten’s Billy Budd and Saint-Saëns’s Samson, though sadly neither of these ever came to fruition. He was awarded the title of Kämmersinger in 2015.

Gould announced his retirement ‘for health reasons’ on 25th August, having withdrawn from his engagements at Bayreuth this summer; the following week he disclosed that he had been diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma and had less than a year to live. Explaining that he had delayed the announcement until the end of the Festival because he ‘did not wish anything to cloud this year’s achievements’, Gould expressed his gratitude to Bayreuth ‘for teaching me all that I could have hoped to know about the performance of this great musician’s works’; in a statement last night the Festival paid tribute to his 'remarkable stamina, irrepressible curiosity and highest professionalism'. He died at home in Virginia on 19th September.

Stephen Gould - a selected discography