Ben Heppner, the great heroic tenor of our time
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
You wouldn’t think of Dawson Creek as a musical hotbed. Yet the town in northeastern B.C. produced one of Canada’s great opera singers, Ben Heppner.
Check that — Heppner is one of the world’s great opera singers.
“Heppner is the undisputed great heroic tenor of the times, a clarion voice that rings through the heaviest metal of the repertory: Wagner’s five-hour epics of the Ring Cycle and Tristan und Isolde, Beethoven’s Fidelio and Berlioz’s massive The Trojans,” wrote the late Vancouver Sun music critic Lloyd Dykk in 2003.
“The tenorial splendour of his voice has been compared to names such as Lauritz Melchior, Jon Vickers and Jussi Bjorling.
He’s sung in all of the world’s leading opera houses, including La Scala, and made his debut at the Met in 1991 in Mozart’s Idomeneo, stepping in, to electrifying praise, when Luciano Pavarotti cancelled.”
Heppner came to opera when he was studying music at the University of B.C. He “gigged occasionally” with the Vancouver Bach Choir, Cantata Singers and Vancouver Chamber Choir between 1976 and 1978, then was seconded into an opera workshop.
“I didn’t take to the opera thing right away,” he admitted to Dykk. “That was something I saw on TV.”
But his natural ability quickly shone through. In 1979, he won the CBC’s Talent Festival, and in 1981 made his operatic debut in the Vancouver Opera’s production of Otello.
He studied at the University of Toronto Opera School in 1981-82, then joined the Canadian Opera Ensemble.
In 1988, he won the inaugural Birgit Nilsson Prize, which led to a role in the Royal Swedish Opera’s production of Wagner’s Lohengrin in Stockholm and Moscow. He became a worldwide sensation.
“Heppner has appeared in virtually all major opera houses in the world,” says his entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia. “La Scala, Covent Garden, Vienna State Opera, Bavarian State Opera (Munich), Frankfurt Opera, Hamburg Opera, Cologne Opera, Grand Theatre de Genève, Salzburg Festival, Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), L’Opera de Marseille, Theatre Royal de la Monnaie (Brussels), Netherlands Opera, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and Paris Opera.”
He’s picked up two Grammy Awards, two Junos, and is a companion of the Order of Canada.
He retired from the stage in 2014 and now focuses on his two CBC Radio shows, Saturday Afternoon at the Opera and Backstage with Ben Heppner.
Born on Jan. 14, 1956, in Langley (most biographies say it was in Murrayville, a small community in Langley Township), he now lives in Toronto.