* En anglais uniquement
Baritone
Peter Mattei has emerged as one of the world's major
Mozart singers, with appearances at top houses in Sweden, around Europe, and in the U.S. He has also appeared in several films.
Mattei was born in Piteå, in far northern Sweden, on June 3, 1965. He grew up in nearby Luleå.
Mattei attended Stockholm's Royal Academy of Music and its Opera University (Operahögskolan), and in 1990, he made his operatic debut at the Drottningholm Castle Theater as Nardo in
Mozart's La finta giardiniera.
Mattei appeared in Antonio Salieri's rarely performed Falstaff in 1992 and played Figaro in
Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro for the first time during the 1994-1995 season at the Royal Stockholm Opera. In 1993, he appeared in a Swedish made-for-television film, The Backers, that was directed by Ingmar Bergman. By the late 1990s,
Mattei was known as one of European opera's rising
Mozart singers. He sang Don Giovanni in
Mozart's opera at the Gothenburg Opera House in 1994-1995 and was cast in the same role at the
Scottish Opera in the autumn of 1995. He later returned to that house to sing Guglielmo in Così fan tutte.
Mattei's repertory is not restricted to
Mozart: other common roles for him have included Lionel in
Tchaikovsky's Joan of Arc, Harlekin in
Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos, and another Figaro, this one in
Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia. In 2002,
Mattei made his debut at New York's
Metropolitan Opera, and he has since made frequent guest appearances with that company and has been seen in its internationally distributed television broadcasts.
Mattei has been active in concert music as well as opera, with
Bach's St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244, and St. John Passion, BWV 245, among his specialties.
Mattei has appeared on numerous operatic and choral recordings, and in the U.S., he won a Grammy award in 2002 as part of the cast in a recording of Berlioz's Les Troyens. He has also released various albums under his name, mostly on the BIS label. On that label, in 2019, he issued a recording of
Schubert's Die Winterreise, D. 911.