The first engagements

My career start as a music school teacher was short-lived because after a chance audition, I was hired at the Opera Studio of the Vienna State Opera. Both the director of the Vienna State Opera at the time, Egon Seefehlner, and the director of the Vienna State Opera Studio, Kammersängerin Gerda Scheyrer, were enthusiastic about my voice. The first step into the full-time singing life as a young tenor was done!

 

Artistic successes soon followed, and I was also able to present my first engagements outside the Vienna State Opera, for example at the Bad Ischl Operetta Festival under the then 93-year-old artistic director Prof. Eduard Macku, a contemporary of Franz Lehár, Emmerich Kálmán and Robert Stolz. In Fritz Kreisler's operetta "Sissy" I shone as Prince Thurn und Taxis alongside Alfons Haider's "Kaiser" and the chamber actress Marianne Schönauer.

 

My first permanent engagement as a lyric tenor took me to the Lübeck City Theater. Full of euphoria, the whole Lippert family moved to northern Germany. The lyric tenor soon became a jack-of-all-trades. Across the musical worlds of opera and operetta, from character tenor to buffo tenor to lyric tenor, everything had to be sung, everything had to be tried out, day after day. What a madness!