Ian Bostridge

Ian Charles Bostridge CBE (born 25 December 1964) is a renowned English tenor and historian.

Early life Bostridge was born in London, the son of Leslie Bostridge and Lillian (née Clark). His father was a chartered surveyor.

Academic career He was a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School. He attended St John's College, Oxford, where he attain first class honours in Modern History, and St John's College, Cambridge, where he attained an M.Phil. in the History and Philosophy of Science. He was awarded a D.Phil. degree in history from the University of Oxford in 1990, for his work on the importance of witchcraft in English public life from 1650 to 1750 that had been supervised by Sir Keith Thomas.

He worked in television news and documentaries for two years in London before becoming a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he taught political theory and eighteenth-century British history. His book Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c. 1650–1750 was published as an Oxford Historical Monograph in 1997, and was described as "the most sophisticated and original of all recent histories of early modern demonology" by Professor Stuart Clark. It "achiev[es] that rarest of feats in the scholarly world: taking a well-worn subject and ensuring that it will never be looked at in quite the same way again" (Noel Malcolm, TLS).

Musical career

Debuts Bostridge began singing professionally at age 27. he has been the subject of a South Bank Show profile documentary on ITV and presented the BBC 4 film The Diary of One Who Disappeared about Czech composer Leoš Janáček. He has written for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times,The Guardian, The Times, Financial Times,The Times Literary Supplement, Opernwelt, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, Opera Now and The Independent.

Later engagements included recitals in Paris, Stockholm, Lisbon, Brussels, Amsterdam and the Vienna Konzerthaus. In North America he appeared in recitals in New York City at the Frick Collection in 1998 and Alice Tully Hall in 1999 and made his Carnegie Hall debut under Sir Neville Marriner. Also in 1998, he sang Vasek in a new production of The Bartered Bride under Bernard Haitink for the Royal Opera and made his debut at the Munich Festival as Nerone (L'incoronazione di Poppea) and in recital (Winterreise at the Cuvilliés Theatre). In 1999, he made his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic under Sir Roger Norrington. He works regularly with the pianists Julius Drake, Graham Johnson, Mitsuko Uchida, composer Thomas Adès and Covent Garden music director Antonio Pappano. Other partners at the piano have included Leif Ove Andsnes, Håvard Gimse, Saskia Giorgini, Igor Levit, and Lars Vogt.

Since 2000 In the summer of 2000 Bostridge gave the fifth annual Edinburgh University Festival Lecture entitled "Music and Magic".

In 2004, Bostridge was made CBE for his services to music. He is an Hon RAM, honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College, St John's College, and Wolfson College Oxford, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of St Andrews in 2003. He was Humanitas Professor of Classical Music and Education at the University of Oxford, 2014–15 (part of the Humanitas Programme). In 2020/21 he was a visiting professor at Munich's Hochschule for Music and Theatre. From 2022 on he is giving courses on Schubert Lieder at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna.

He gave the inaugural Nicholas Breakspear lecture, "Classical Attitudes: Latin and music through the ages" at the University of Trondheim in 2015; and the annual BIRTHA lecture, "Humanity in Song: Schubert's Winter Journey" at the University of Bristol in the same year. He delivered the Lincoln Kirstein Lecture, "Song and Dance", at NYU in 2016. He gave the Berlin Family Lectures at the University of Chicago in April 2021 and the Anthony Hecht Lectures at Bard College in October 2025.

Bostridge had his own year-long Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall in 2005/6, and a twelve-month residency at the Barbican in 2008, "Homeward Bound". He has had a Carte Blanche season at the Concertgebouw and further artistic residencies in Luxembourg, Hamburg, the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg and the Wigmore Hall.

On 11 November 2009 Bostridge sang Agnus Dei from Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, at the Armistice Day service in Westminster Abbey. This uses the words of war poet Wilfred Owen's "At a Calvary near the Ancre". The service marked the loss of the WWI generation, whose last members died earlier the same year. Bostridge performed Kurt Weill's anti-war Four Walt Whitman Songs in 2014. He also has a long history with directing and performing The Threepenny Opera.

In 2013, he performed as part of the Barbican Britten centenary festival in London, and released a new recording of the composer's War Requiem.