Born in Erfurt in 1973, the German baritone Stephan Genz was a chorister of St Thomas’s, Leipzig. Following vocal studies with Hans-Joachim Beyer at the conservatory of Leipzig, he worked with Mitsuko Shirai and Hartmut Höll at the conservatory of Karlsruhe as well as with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. He won awards at such prestigious competitions as the International Johannes Brahms Competition in Hamburg (1994) and the International Hugo Wolf Competition in Stuttgart (1994), and since then has appeared at leading opera houses, including the Berlin Staatsoper, Hamburg Staatsoper, the Paris Bastille, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and Châtelet, La Scala in Milan, the Grand Théâtre de Genève, Semperoper Dresden, La Fenice in Venice, Strasbourg, Cologne and Aix-en-Provence.