At a school event he sang an aria from Cornelius' The Barber of Bagdad, but did not know that his father had brought colleagues Oskar Czerwenka and Eberhard Waechter.
Engagements followed at major opera houses worldwide, including the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, as well as Paris, New York, Cape Town, Monte Carlo, Santiago de Chile, Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam, St. Gallen, Turin, Naples, Rome, Düsseldorf, Saarbrücken and Stuttgart, and the Bregenz Festival.
He made his debut at the Vienna State Opera in October 1991 with his longstanding parade role, Papageno in the magic flute by Schikaneder and Mozart.
In the German repertoire he sings Pizzaro and Don Fernando in Beethoven's Fidelio, Peter in Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel, Kaspar in Weber's Freischütz, the Heerrufer in Wagner's Lohengrin, Johannes Freudhofer in Kienzl's Der Evangelimann and Moruccio in d'Albert's Tiefland.
In August 2015, he made his debut at the Salzburg Festival as Don Fernando in a Fidelio new production by Claus Guth and Franz Welser-Möst at the Großes Festspielhaus.