Wolfgang Brendel (born 20 October 1947, in Munich) is a German opera singer (baritone), and a professor of voice at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.
In some sense taking up the mantle of Josef Metternich, who had retired in 1971, Brendel established his primacy as the star Munich baritone of his era across an extraordinary range of roles, from Mozart (not only Guglielmo but Count Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro, Papageno in Die Zauberflöte, the title role in Don Giovanni) to Verdi (Germont in La traviata, Posa in Don Carlo, Renato in Un ballo in maschera, Carlo in La forza del destino, and di Luna in Il trovatore) and beyond.
Sabine Tomzig wrote in the Hamburger Abendblatt: "A discovery: the 25-year-old Munich baritone as Pelleas, a Gallic figure with that lightness and brightness of timbre that predestines him for a part that is usually sung by tenors" ("Eine Entdeckung: der 25jährige Münchener Bariton Wolfgang Brendel als Pelleas, ein romanischer Typ mit jener Leichtigkeit und Helligkeit des Timbres, das ihn für diese meist von Tenören gesungene Partie prädestiniert").
Early on the conductor Carlos Kleiber selected him to sing Germont, conducting him also in other roles (for example, Falke in Die Fledermaus; in later years, Brendel would graduate to Eisenstein).
(He has also performed the Music Master in Ariadne auf Naxos, Orest in Elektra, the Count in Capriccio, and Altair in Die ägyptische Helena).
Brendel has performed on all the major opera stages in Germany (Hamburg State Opera, both the Deutsche Oper and the Staatsoper in Berlin, Dresden) and throughout Europe (Vienna, Milan, London, Paris, Bayreuth, Dresden, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Madrid), in Tokyo, and in the United States (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas).