By Anne Midgette

King Marke's is a thankless task. The potentate in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde has the unenviable job of interrupting one of the greatest love duets in opera in a blatant musical example of coitus interruptus; after this, he goes on and on about the situation in a monologue that often strikes the audience as lengthy, static, and-given the dramatic situation-frustrating. So it came as something of a surprise when, in the Metropolitan Opera's new Tristan production in November 1999, René Pape burst on stage as King Marke-and stole the show.

This was perhaps not a great sign for the evening as a whole. As a colleague remarked, when King Marke's monologue is the highlight, your Tristan production is in trouble. True as that may be, the operative factor was less this Tristan's weakness than this Marke's strength. Pape has a deep, rich, flexible bass: not a pitch-black sound but a warm vital one, ripe with unforced power. But rather than presenting sound production as an end in itself, he used it as a point of departure in shaping a character, a dramatic situation. His Marke was an expressive, anguished human being, profound not only in the depth of his notes, but in the content of his utterance. A great artist, it was clear, had arrived.

Not that Pape was exactly new to the scene. In fact, he's been doing King Markes, and other roles, for many years. The 36-year-old German already looks back on a lengthy performing career. He started out as a member of the Kreuzchor, the highly regarded boys' choir in his native Dresden, in what was then East Germany, and went on to study at that city's Carl Maria von Weber conservatory. The fact that he went straight into a house contract when he graduated from that conservatory in 1988 wasn't all that striking, since the DDR (East Germany) still guaranteed a job for every citizen. However, it did speak for his special abilities that he landed a post at the Staatsoper in Berlin, rather than one of the country's 50-some other, lesser-known opera houses.

And keeping that post, after the tumultuous political events of the following year that led to the rending of the Iron Curtain and the toppling of the Berlin Wall, was a feat, as well. When Daniel Barenboim arrived as music director in 1992, he was happy to champion the bass. Pape, in fact, remains a member of the Staatsoper's ensemble even today, singing a range of roles, as a house position normally entails. In the 2001-02 season, he takes on six roles at Unter den Linden, from Pogner and Fasolt to Mozart's Figaro and, in May, the title role in Don Giovanni. (He already did Leporello when the production premiered earlier in 2001.)

But even at the beginning, Pape was far from your average ensemble member. For one thing, he rapidly made the move from small roles to large ones, taking on Figaro, Don Alfonso (Così), and Sarastro in his early seasons at the Staatsoper. He also was precocious in making the leap to other internationally regarded houses. Sir Georg Solti noticed him early on; within a couple of years, thanks to him, Pape became the youngest-ever Sarastro to sing at the prestigious Salzburg Festival. Within a few years of his start in Berlin, he had debuted in Vienna, Bayreuth, and Milan (La Scala). In Munich, where I lived for most of the 1990s, we started hearing him quite soon, in, for example, a 1995 Mahler Eighth-in which, next to Sharon Sweet, Alessandra Marc, and Ben Heppner, he and Vesselina Kasarova were among the smaller singers, in terms both of reputation and of girth. (The performance, with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis, was recorded for RCA.)

Not all of his debut roles were star vehicles, either. For all of his large-scale successes, he also paid his dues in smaller roles, gaining, as he saw it, valuable experience. "Even if you only sing a few measures each performance in a large house [as a young singer], your voice unfolds and gets used to the requirements of the space, so that later it can grow into roles like Leporello or Hunding," he said in a German interview earlier this year. Certainly his Met debut role wasn't exactly calculated to break the doors down: the Nachtwächter in Wagner's Meistersinger. (Even in that, he got some people's attention.)

One striking thing about Pape is his many-sidedness. Where some basses with his vocal equipment and native language might stick to the Wagner roles (which are inarguably among his strengths), he's made a point of not limiting himself to the German Fach. Recent Met roles have included Escamillo and the Old Hebrew in Samson et Dalilah (his debut role at the San Francisco Opera in September 2001), and he's also forging his way in the Verdi repertory; the Requiem, in particular, became something of a calling-card in 2001, the Verdi centennial year.

Another striking thing is his ability to grow. Taken by itself, broad international exposure fresh out of the starting gate isn't necessarily a sign of a great artist. All too often, in fact, it's the opposite. The path of opera is littered with the names of people who were hyped big and early, only to hit rocky terrain a few seasons into the exercise-whether because they ran into vocal trouble, taking on too many roles too soon, or because their shoulders weren't yet broad enough to support the mantle of greatness thrust upon them by early listeners.

This was almost literally true in the Achim Freyer production of Zauberflöte that Pape did in 1997 at Salzburg. In this production, Sarastro wears a huge costume that builds him up, giant-like, with large false hands and shoulders, and the singer inside seemed dwarfed, stifled by the size of his costume, unable fully to hold up the weight of the role. The next year, I again heard Pape at Salzburg, as an eleventh-hour replacement for Samuel Ramey in Wernicke's Don Carlo under Lorin Maazel, and he seemed to be having a similar problem. There was no mistaking the talent and ability on stage, but I worried that he might fall victim to his early hype by taking on too much, too soon.

The King Marke appearance silenced all such thoughts. Pape has ripened into a mellow prime, vocal beauty joined by an evident emotional maturity that enables him to bring roles not only to music, but to life. As his Marke stole Tristan, his Rocco (recorded under Barenboim, for Teldec) has been stealing Fidelios around the country, and his Old Hebrew threatens to upstage Samson. In fact, just about anything he does on stage is generally worth the price of admission.

Even as the bass soloist in the Beethoven Ninth, a role that a German bass is called on to do many, many times in his career, Pape adds a special luster-enough to draw raves from at least one New York Times critic. After a recent New Year's Eve concert performance of the symphony (a tradition in many parts of Germany) with the New York Philharmonic, Allan Kozinn wrote: "The biggest surprise of the evening was provided by René Pape.... [The bass has] an unenviable task here: after the tumultuous introduction of the fourth movement, he is asked to sing, unaccompanied, the line `O Freunde, nicht diese Töne' (`O friends, not these tones'), and more often than not his entrance is disappointingly dwarfed by the music that has just been heard.... Mr. Pape had no such problem. His voice, deep, rich and warm, sang out into the hall. It was a moment that, for once, was exactly as it should be."

As he continues to explore and develop, Pape hopes to conquer more new territory-Boris Godunov, perhaps. The only reservation one might have about honoring him as Musical America's Vocalist of the Year in 2002 is that it leaves no further accolade open when, however many years hence, the singer (inevitably) takes on Wotan. Opera's future sometimes appears dark; but the promise of that debut is enough to illuminate at least a part of it.

Anne Midgette is a freelance critic and arts writer. A regular classical music critic for The New York Times, she has also written frequently for The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Opera News, OpernWelt, and many other publications. Now a resident of New York City, she lived for 11 years in Munich, Germany, where she reviewed European opera and music, did freelance work for everyone from BMG to the BBC, and wrote several travel guidebooks.