Klaus Hager

Klaus Häger is a German baritone who began to come to national and European attention during the 1990s. He began his interest in music as a child with cello and piano lessons. He decided on a career in music, imagining a career as organist and chorusmaster. He studied at the Music Academies (Musikhochschulen) of Cologne and Freiburg, where his talent for singing became evident and he studied with Franz Müller-Heuser and Ingeborg Most. He went on to take master classes with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Ernst Haefliger, and Sena Jurinac, then competed successfully, winning the German Federal Presidential Stipend and the Walter Kaminsky Memorial Prize. This recognition was followed by numerous engagements to sing Lieder recitals, orchestral concerts, and oratorios both in German and abroad. In 1991, he joined the Hamburg State Opera until the end of the 1996-1997 season, and that fall joined the roster of the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden. In Berlin he has been something of an early opera specialist, singing Herakles in Alceste, Achilla in Cleopatre e Cesare, among others. One of his signature roles is Papageno in The Magic Flute and, in the twentieth-century repertory, he has sung the part of Diener in Alban Berg's Lulu.