Alexander Kipnis was born on February 1, 1891, in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, which at the time belonged to the Russian Empire. He grew up in a poor family and had to help make ends meet from an early age. A cantor recognized the boy’s soprano voice and trained him. He subsequently found employment at a synagogue in Poland and continued his musical education at the Warsaw Conservatory, where he graduated as a military music director. To avoid being conscripted into the Russian army, Kipnis moved to Berlin, where he again worked as a synagogue singer to finance his vocal studies, among others under Ernst Grenzebach.
After the outbreak of the First World War, he was initially interned as an “enemy alien”, but in 1915 he received an engagement at the Stadttheater in Hamburg, marking the beginning of an extraordinarily successful career. In 1917 he became a member of the Hoftheater in Wiesbaden, where he developed most of the Mozart and Wagner roles for which he would become famous. In 1919 he moved to the Deutsches Opernhaus in Berlin—later the Städtische Oper—and in 1923 began an international career. He sang at the opera in Chicago and celebrated successes in New York and London, as well as at the Bayreuth Festival after 1927. In 1932 he joined the ensemble of the Berlin State Opera.
The Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 brought an end to Alexander Kipnis’s career in Germany. Although he was required to fulfill his contract with the Berlin State Opera, which did not release him until 1935 due to his prominence, he was demonstratively active in the Jewish Cultural Federation. He left Germany in 1935 and lived in Vienna until 1938. After the annexation of Austria in March of 1938, he left Europe and emigrated to the United States, of which he had already become a citizen in 1931. Until 1946 he was one of the stars of New York’s Metropolitan Opera before retiring from the stage and becoming a sought-after voice teacher at the New York College of Music and at the Juilliard School.
Alexander Kipnis died on May 14, 1978, in Westport, Connecticut.
1891 Schytomyr
1978 Westport