Christian Van Horn

The American bass-baritone Christian Van Horn appears at the world’s leading opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the San Francisco Opera, the Santa Fe Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, the Paris Opéra, the Bavarian State Opera (where he has also appeared as part of the Munich Opera Festival), the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, the Stuttgart State Opera, the Grand Théâtre de Genève and the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam. He made his Salzburg Festival debut in 2008 in Roméo et Juliette.

His opera repertory includes the title roles of Don Giovanni and Mefistofele, Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro), Nick Shadow (The Rake’s Progress), Méphistophélès (Faust), Claggart (Billy Budd), the four villains (Les Contes d’Hoffmann), Escamillo (Carmen), Enrico VIII (Anna Bolena), Colline (La bohème), Alidoro (La Cenerentola), Timur (Turandot), Banco (Macbeth), Narbal (Les Troyens), Oroveso (Norma), Zaccaria (Nabucco), Gessler (Guillaume Tell) and Frère Laurent (Roméo et Juliette). He has also performed in the world premieres of Tan Dun’s Tea: A Mirror of Soul at the Santa Fe Opera and Marco Tutino’s Two Women (La ciociara) at the San Francisco Opera, and in the American premiere of Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel at the Met.

His recent engagements have included the title role in Massenet’s Don Quichotte and the four villains at the Paris Opéra, where he will return in spring 2025 as Philippe II (Don Carlos), Don Giovanni at the Vienna State Opera, Raimondo (Lucia di Lammermoor) in Munich and Bluebeard in a concert performance of Bluebeard’s Castle at Carnegie Hall in New York.

As a concert singer Christian Van Horn has appeared with the Cleveland Orchestra (in Cleveland and at Carnegie Hall), the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic (at the Salzburg Easter Festival) and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. He has also performed at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, the Bard Music Festival and at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

He can be heard on CD as Figaro in a recording of Le nozze di Figaro conducted by Teodor Currentzis.

Christian Van Horn received the Richard Tucker Award in 2018 and was a winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 2003. He studied at Yale University and is a graduate of the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.