Willy Frey

He was the son of a litographer. He studied music and singing in Zurich and later in Paris. Then he got engagements in Breslau, Hamburg, the Berlin and Vienna operas, the German Festival Plays at the Theatre Pigalle in Paris, and sang Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail as a guest in Barcelona and in many other venues. He spent most of his career in his country : Zurich, Basilea, Geneva, Luzern, Saint Gallen and mainly Bern. He was trained in the Italian lyric style as a tenor, and also played intermediate voice parts and performed as Heldentenor, both in stage operas and in concert. He sang Italian, German, French and Slavic repertoire. He was keen on many sports, and agile as an interpreter, which added effective acting to his singing. After World War II was over, he combined singing with directing, and staged many operas in Bern, becoming sound engineer and director for Radio Bern between 1947 and 1966. It was also in that city that he gave his last bow on stage in 1960 with Haydn's Il mondo della luna. Then he stayed as teacher at the Bern Music Academy (Konservatorium für Musik) from 1960 until 1981. He married twice, to actress Käthe Gold (their son died shortly after birth) and to Annemarie Düsterdieck. He also occasionally went into pictures for the Swiss cinema post-war industry, like Matura-Reise (1943) or Frühlingslied (1954).