He was an office clerk, and he served in the US Army in World War II; only after the war, he studied voice with Edgar
Milton Cook in New York, from 1946 to 1952. Already while still studying, he sang musical on Broadway, and won the
Metropolitan Opera Awards.
In 1952, he moved to Germany, where he sang in Düsseldorf for two seasons, then in Stuttgart from 1954 to 1968.
There, he was Cavaradossi in the first opera performance broadcast on German TV, with Renata Tebaldi and George London in
1961. Beyond Stuttgart, he had contracts for regular guest appearances in Hamburg (1956–64), at the Deutsche Oper
Berlin (1959–61), in Köln (1960–65), and again in Düsseldorf (from 1965 onwards). Other than that,
he sang in Florence at the Maggio Musicale, in Zürich, at the Vienna Staatsoper (32 performances from 1956 to 1963,
as Cavaradossi, Radames, Calaf, Italienischer Sänger, Don José, Canio, Froh and Erik), in San Francisco,
Seattle, Chicago, Munich, Frankfurt, Brussels, Marseille, Lyon, Nice, Strasbourg, Amsterdam, Athens, Tel Aviv, at La
Scala (three performances as Froh, 1963) and at the Bayreuth Festival (a few tiny parts in 1953 and 1954).
Over time, he expanded his repertory as far as Alvaro, Otello, Samson, Stolzing, Parsifal, Siegmund and Bacchus.
In the early 1970s, he returned to the US, where he occasionally still appeared on stage.
Reference 1, reference 2 and picture
source: Klaus Ulrich Spiegel
