Victor Braun

Victor Braun was born in Windsor, Ontario, in August 1935 and studied at the University of Western Ontario and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. He made his début with the Canadian Opera Company in 1961 and moved to Germany in 1963 to join the Frankfurt Opera, where he remained as a principal baritone for the next twenty-five years.

His repertoire was unusually broad. He was a notable Mozart singer (Don Giovanni, the Count in *Le nozze di Figaro*) and a regular Verdi baritone (Rigoletto, Macbeth, Iago), but his international reputation rested particularly on the contemporary roles he premiered or championed — the title role in Aribert Reimann’s *Lear* (Munich, 1978), Wozzeck in Berg’s opera (a role he sang at Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera and across Europe), and parts in works by Henze, Penderecki and Boulez. He worked regularly at Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera, the Bavarian State Opera and the Salzburg Festival. He was the father of the baritone Russell Braun.

Braun was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1990. He died in Toronto in January 2001. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his contemporary and standard-repertoire work from the 1970s and 1980s.