Before his voice had developed fully, Sigurd Björling played the violin in a cinema orchestra in Stockholm. He studied singing initially with Louis Condé and then at the Royal Stockholm Conservatory with Torsten Lennartsson and John Forsell (who also taught his namesake, the tenor Jussi Björling, to whom Sigurd was not related); he studied also with the conductor Leo Blech. Björling made his operatic stage debut in 1936 as Alfio / Cavalleria rusticana with the Royal Opera Stockholm, soon afterwards joining this company and remaining with it for over thirty years. Among the first performances in which he participated were Natanael Berg’s Judith (1936) and Gunnar de Frumerie’s Singoalla (1941); and he created the roles of Balstrode and Mathis in the first Swedish productions of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (1948) and Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler (1950).
During 1942 and 1943 Björling sang in Vienna, and after the end of World War II he developed an international presence. In 1951 he made his debut at the Bayreuth Festival, singing Wotan in the Ring cycle and establishing himself as a Wagnerian singer of the first rank. Also in 1951 Björling appeared at Covent Garden (as Amfortas, Kurwenal and Wotan) and sang Kurwenal in the same year at La Scala, Milan in a production conducted by Victor De Sabata. Between 1951 and 1959 he performed regularly with the Vienna State Opera. Other European centres where he appeared included Berlin, Brussels, Munich, Rome, Naples and Stuttgart; and, between 1955 and 1958, Paris.
With the San Francisco Opera Björling appeared in 1950 as Kurwenal / Tristan und Isolde, Amfortas / Parsifal and Jochanaan / Salome (Richard Strauss). He made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera, New York as Telramund / Lohengrin in 1952, and during the 1952–1953 season also sang the High Priest / Samson et Dalila, Scarpia / Tosca and Rangoni / Boris Godunov, as well as Kurwenal and Amfortas.
Björling’s roles with the Royal Opera Stockholm, with which he sang until 1970, were similarly wide-ranging, and included the title parts in Don Giovanni, Macbeth (Verdi), Prince Igor and Arnljot (Peterson-Berger), as well as Count Almaviva / Le nozze di Figaro, Conte di Luna / Il trovatore, Don Alfonso / Così fan tutte, Klingsor / Parsifal, Méphistophélès / Faust (Gounod), Nélusko / L’Africaine and Sebastiano / Tiefland.
He received several honours in his native country, being made a Court Singer in 1946, a member of the order ‘Litteris et artibus’ in 1956 and a member of the Swedish Music Academy in 1957. Sigurd Björling possessed a most virile baritone voice, as his few but highly distinguished recordings demonstrate. Of these, that of Act III of Die Walküre, conducted by Herbert von Karajan and recorded at the 1951 Bayreuth Festival, is especially notable.
© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Singers, Naxos 8.558097-100).