Josef Hopferwieser

Josef Hopferwieser (25 May 1938 – 9 July 2015) was an Austrian operatic tenor.
Life.
Born in Graz, Hopferwieser came from a musical family. His father Josef Hopferwieser (1907-1999) was an organ builder there. Hopferwieser began playing the piano at an early age, and he liked to sing. But he came to singing as a profession more by chance. He first completed training as a painter and varnisher in the motor-vehicle sector and ran his own workshop in Graz. After the Graz Academy was opened in 1960, he received his vocal training there from the age of eighteen or nineteen with the soprano Herma Handl. He studied at the Graz Academy for about a year as an extraordinary pupil alongside his actual profession. On the advice of his teacher, Hopferwieser went to an audition at a Viennese artist agency. There, he was discovered by the then Braunschweig theatre directors Heribert Esser and Hellmuth Matiasek, and was immediately engaged as a lyric tenor in Braunschweig.
In 1964, he made his professional debut as an opera singer at the Staatstheater Braunschweig with the role of Count Almaviva in "The Barber of Seville". Further roles in his Braunschweig time were Fenton in "Falstaff", Don Ottavio, the Duke of Urbino in the operetta "Eine Nacht in Venedig" as well as the two "buffo" roles Brighella and Tanzmeister in "Ariadne auf Naxos". Further engagements followed, two years at the Aalto Theatre in Essen (1967-1969), and then four at the Oper Frankfurt (1969-1973), where he gradually took over the youthful Heldentenor parts alongside lyrical roles such as Lindoro in "L'italiana in Algeri" (alongside Agnes Baltsa). In Frankfurt he sang roles such as Alwa in "Lulu" (with Anja Silja in the title role and conductor Christoph von Dohnányi), the title role in "The Tales of Hoffmann", Tom Rakewell in "The Rake's Progress", the title role in "Faust" (with Julia Varady; stage director: Bohumil Herlischka) and Don José in "Carmen" (1973; stage director: Jean-Pierre Ponnelle), as well as some parts of the Italian repertoire, like the title role in "Don Carlos" and Riccardo in "Un ballo in maschera". In Frankfurt, Hopferwieser finally made the permanent change from lyric tenor to young Heldentenor.
In October 1970 he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera in the title role in "The Tales of Hoffmann".<ref name="Löcker">Rollenverzeichnis von Josef Hopferwieser in "Chronik der Wiener Staatsoper 1945-2005", 