Samuel Ramey (born March 28, 1942) is an American operatic bass.[1][2] At the height of his career, he was greatly admired for his range and versatility, having possessed a sufficiently accomplished bel canto technique which enabled him to sing the music of Handel, Mozart and Rossini but with enough vocal power to handle the more overtly dramatic roles in Verdi, Puccini, and Meyerbeer operas.
Ramey graduated from Colby High School in Colby, Kansas in 1960. He studied music in high school and in college at Kansas State University, as well as at Wichita State with Arthur Newman. At Kansas State, he was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity.
Ramey was in the chorus of Don Giovanni in 1963, with Norman Treigle in the title role, while studying with the Central City Opera in Central City, Colorado. After being an apprentice with the Santa Fe Opera in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he worked for an academic publisher in New York City before he had his first breakthrough while at the New York City Opera debuting on March 11, 1973, as Zuniga in the 1875 Bizet opera Carmen. He took over that role as well as the Faustian devils in Gounod's Faust and Boito's Mefistofele, which was vacated by the early death of Treigle.
As his repertoire expanded he worked extensively in European theaters notably in Berlin, Hamburg, London, Paris, Milan, and Vienna in addition to summer festivals in Aix-en-Provence, Glyndebourne, Pesaro, and Salzburg.
In January 1984, Ramey made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in Handel's Rinaldo. He became a fixture at the Teatro alla Scala, Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, Vienna State Opera, the Paris Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the New York City Opera, the San Francisco Opera and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires (Attila, The Rake's Progress, Mefistofele) since then. In July 1985 he was cast as Bertram in the historic revival in Paris of Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le diable.
Ramey has sung in Mozart's Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro and, in the bel canto repertoire, in Rossini's Semiramide, The Barber of Seville, Il Turco in Italia, L'italiana in Algeri, and La Gazza Ladra; in Donizetti's Anna Bolena and Lucia di Lammermoor and Bellini's I puritani. In the dramatic repertoire, Ramey has been acclaimed for his "Three Devils": Boito's Mefistofele, Gounod's Faust and Berlioz's dramatic legend Damnation of Faust.[3] Other dramatic roles of his have included Verdi's Nabucco, Don Carlo, I masnadieri, I Lombardi and Jérusalem, as well as Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (he portrayed all four villains).
In 1990, he sang the role of Joe in Jerome Kern's Show Boat in a concert performance at Avery Fisher Hall with Jerry Hadley and Frederica von Stade.[4] A number of previously obscure operas with strong bass/bass-baritone roles have been revived solely for Ramey, such as Verdi's Attila, Rossini's Maometto II and Massenet's Don Quichotte. He provided the voice for The Beast, the main antagonist of the 2014 animated miniseries Over the Garden Wall.[5] In 1996, he gave a concert at New York's Avery Fisher Hall titled "A Date with the Devil" in which he sang 14 arias representing the core of this repertory. He continued to tour with the program throughout the world.[6] In 2000, he presented the concert at Munich's Gasteig Concert Hall. The performance was recorded live and was released on compact disc in summer 2002.[7]
He formerly served as a member of the faculty at Roosevelt University's Chicago College of Performing Arts and is currently a distinguished professor of Opera at Wichita State University's School of Music.[8] He was named an inaugural member of the WSU College of Fine Arts Hall of Fame in 2015.[9] He is a national patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.[citation needed] He reprised the title role of "Duke Bluebeard" in Opera Omaha's production of Béla Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle in April 2013 in Omaha, Nebraska.[10]
Ramey has made an exceptionally high number of recordings documenting many of his main operatic roles as well as collections of miscellaneous arias, other classical pieces, and crossover discs of popular American music. He has appeared on television and video productions of the Met's productions of Carmen and Bluebeard's Castle, San Francisco's production of Mefistofele, Glyndebourne's production of The Rake's Progress, and Salzburg's production of Don Giovanni.[11]
He married his third wife, soprano Lindsey Larsen, on June 29, 2002.[12][13] They have one son.[14]