Tenor Piotr Beczala has enjoyed a long career encompassing performances of operas from Italy, Germany, and France, as well as from his native Eastern Europe. In middle age, he has added Italian verismo operas to his repertory.

Beczala (pronounced Be-tsa-wa with the proper Polish diacritical marks in place) was born on December 28, 1966, in Czechowice-Dziedzice in southern Poland. He studied singing at the Katowice Academy of Music; among his teachers were Pavel Lisitsian and Sena Jurinac. Beczala came of age as a singer just as opportunities were opening in the West after the fall of Communism, and he joined the cast of the Linz State Theater in Austria in 1992. He moved on in 1997 to the Zurich Opera in Switzerland. Major debuts at international houses began in 2004 with an appearance as the Italian Tenor in Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier at the Royal Opera House in London, returning to that house several more times over the next three years. Beczala's U.S. debut came in late 2004 at the San Francisco Opera, as Lensky in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. He made two important debuts in 2006, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and La Scala in Milan, Italy, both times as the Duke in Verdi's Rigoletto. That role was a staple of his repertory for many years, but he has also sung roles by composers as diverse as Offenbach, Smetana, and Janacek. In 2012, he encountered controversy when a new production of Rigoletto got a hostile reception at La Scala -- not because of his performance but because of a modern production style. He vowed never to perform at the influential house again. In the late 2010s, he began to take heavier roles, appearing at the Semperoper in Dresden in 2016 in Wagner's Lohengrin, opposite soprano Anna Netrebko, and singing the role of Cavaradossi in Puccini's Tosca for the first time at the Vienna State Opera in 2019. He has increasingly often sung and has begun to record Italian opera in the verismo style.

Beczala also has a large repertory of choral and vocal concert works, and he made his recording debut in 2004 with an album on the Channel Classics label devoted to the complete songs of Karol Szymanowski. He has appeared on various opera recordings and has also issued solo recitals, including, in 2013, one devoted to numbers popularized by operetta tenor Richard Tauber. He has recorded for Orfeo, Deutsche Grammophon, and PentaTone, where, in 2020, he issued Vincerò!, an album of verismo operas. ~ James Manheim, Rovi