Kurt Streit

Kurt Streit was born in Japan as the son of US citizens. In 2005 he became a citizen of Austria, where he lived with his son in Styria. In January 2018 he retired, and he now lives in Halifax, Canada.

Kurt Streit (born 14 October 1959 in Itazuke, Fukuoka, Japan) is an Austrian-American tenor who performs in operas.

Streit started his career at American opera houses such as San Francisco, Santa Fe, Dallas, the Texas Opera Theater and the Milwaukee Skylight Comic Opera. His European career started with the Hamburg Staatsoper, where he sang in operas by Mozart, Donizetti, and Rossini. He appeared at music festivals in Schwetzingen, Aix-en-Provence, Salzburg and Glyndebourne. Streit performed at most international opera houses, including The Vienna State Opera, Theater an der Wien, The Metropolitan Opera New York, The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in London, La Scala in Milan, both the Bastille and the Grand Opera in Paris, Teatro Real the Zarzuela in Madrid, and the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, Munich, Brussels, Leipzig, Düsseldorf, San Francisco. He was nominated for a Grammy award for his recording of Brahms' Liebeslieder-Walzer. Streit is considered a Mozart specialist and has performed in 23 different productions of Mozart's Zauberflöte and 7 different productions of Mozart's Idomeneo, just to name a few of his many international appearances in Mozart operas. His repertoire stretches from works of Händel and Monteverdi as well as Beethoven and 19th and 20th century composers such as Wagner, Johann Strauss, Berlioz and Janáček.