Walter Thomas Hampson was born on 28 June 1955 in Elkhart, Indiana, and grew up in Spokane, Washington, where he sang in church with his two older sisters. He studied at Eastern Washington State College and earned a degree in voice performance at Fort Wright College, later working at the Music Academy of the West with Gwendolyn Koldofsky and Martial Singher and at the University of Southern California with the baritone Horst Günter. Winning a San Francisco Opera audition in 1980 brought him into the Merola Opera Program, where he met Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who became his teacher; in 1981 he was a national winner in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. An audition tour of Europe led to three seasons in the ensemble of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf from 1981 to 1984. He has since sung in major opera houses and concert halls worldwide.

Hampson’s operatic repertoire extends to more than eighty roles, with a Verdi core that includes Rodrigo in Don Carlo, Germont in La traviata and the title roles of Macbeth and Simon Boccanegra, alongside Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Rossini, Thomas’s Hamlet and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. As a recitalist he is known for carefully researched thematic programmes and particularly for his interpretations of Gustav Mahler. Through the Song of America project, developed with the Library of Congress, he became a leading advocate for American art song and was named a living legend by the Librarian of Congress. He has made more than 170 recordings, and his discography has earned a Grammy Award, multiple Edison and Echo prizes, Gramophone Awards and the Grand Prix du Disque.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hampson