Rudolf Christ was an Austrian tenor

Tenor

The tenor is a type of male singing voice and is the highest male voice within the modal register. The typical tenor voice lies between C3, the C one octave below middle C, to the A above middle C in choral music, and up to high C in solo work. The low extreme for tenors is roughly B2...

 concert and opera singer.

Christ began his career in 1939 as chorister in the Vienna Volksoper

Vienna Volksoper

The Vienna Volksoper is a major opera house in Vienna, Austria. It gives about three hundred performances of twenty-five productions during an annual season running from September through June....

. He then studied for three years with Adolf Vogel in Vienna. In 1941 he made his debut as soloist at the Landestheater in Innsbruck

Innsbruck

- Main sights :- Buildings :*Golden Roof*Kaiserliche Hofburg *Hofkirche with the cenotaph of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor*Altes Landhaus...

, and he worked from 1946-49 at the Zürich

Zürich

Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...

 City Theatre as lyric tenor and operetta singer. In 1949 he went back to the Vienna Volksoper, where he remained a member of the Company until his retirement in 1976. In addition, Christ was from 1956 engaged at the German Oper am Rhein, at Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...

-Duisburg

Duisburg

- History :A legend recorded by Johannes Aventinus holds that Duisburg, was built by the eponymous Tuisto, mythical progenitor of Germans, ca. 2395 BC...

, and made very numerous guest appearances at the Vienna State Opera, and also at the large theatres in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland. From 1955 he very often appeared also at the Salzburg Festival

Salzburg Festival

The Salzburg Festival is a prominent festival of music and drama established in 1920. It is held each summer within the Austrian town of Salzburg, the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart...

, most notably as Jaquino in Fidelio

Fidelio

Fidelio is a German opera in two acts by Ludwig van Beethoven. It is Beethoven's only opera. The German libretto is by Joseph Sonnleithner from the French of Jean-Nicolas Bouilly which had been used for the 1798 opera Léonore, ou L’amour conjugal by Pierre Gaveaux, and for the 1804 opera Leonora...

in 1958.

He was buried in the Grinzinger Cemetery in Vienna.

Source

• German National Biographical Index.