José van Dam Has Died

José van Dam, the Belgian bass-baritone described by one critic as “an elegant and immensely satisfying singer,” died at his home in Croatia on Feb. 17. He was 85.

His career as an opera singer and recitalist extended over five decades, during which he carefully chose roles he felt best suited his voice at the moment. Early in his career, he focused on roles sung by true basses, before shifting to higher lying baritone parts as he aged. As his range expanded, his repertoire grew accordingly, eventually including the major operas of Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Strauss, Gounod, and Massenet, as well as less well-known works like Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Berg’s Wozzeck, and Messiaen’s St. François d’Assise.

In his later years, Van Dam focused more and more on recitals. His last opera performance came in the title role of Massenet’s Quixote adaptation Don Quichotte at La Monnaie in Brussels in 2010, when he was 70.

Born in Brussels on Aug. 25, 1940, Van Dam began studying singing when he was 14 and later enrolled at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. He made his professional debut at 20, as Don Basilio in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville in Liège. He cut his teeth on minor roles at the Paris Opera for four years before spending two years singing at Geneva, La Scala, and Covent Garden.

In 1968 Lorin Maazel invited Van Dam to join the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, where he spent eight years. During that period he also scored a triumph as Don Fernando in Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Salzburg Easter Festival with the Berlin Philharmonic and its conductor, Herbert von Karajan. He would go on to make many of his recordings with Karajan.

Van Dam’s Met debut came in 1975 as Escamillo, one of his signature roles. In The New York Times, John Rockwell wrote: “It is a large, mellow instrument, able to modulate smoothly into soft singing. And his stage presence made the matador a fully commanding figure without falling into macho cheapness.”

In 2004, six years before his final opera performance, Van Dam began teaching at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Waterloo, Belgium, a relationship that continued until his retirement in 2023. When judging his long career, he said, “The most important thing is that the day I stop singing, people will say, ‘It’s too bad van Dam is no longer singing,’ instead of ‘It’s too bad van Dam continues to sing.’”

The New York Times