Fabulous: Harald Serafin celebrates his 90th birthday – Vorarlberger Nachrichten

Harald Serafin isn’t a Christian, but he’s a lucky kid that longtime singer, actor, artist, and director Morbisch Sevaschelbeli can look back on a long-featured career, which began on December 24, 1931. The room singer who rose to “Mr. Wonderbar” with” His role” as a more moderate jury of “Dancing Stars” celebrates his 90th birthday today.

Seraphine saw the light of day on Christmas Eve in Lithuania. His mother came from the Salzburg region, from which he says that he has his own funny style and talent for “ripping off customers”. His temperament comes from an Italian father. The parents had to leave Lithuania for the first time in 1939, and after a few years they fled from East Prussia to Bamberg. The money was made by entrepreneurs in their textile house. Her son, Harald, was originally supposed to be a doctor.

Seraphin studied medicine for a few semesters, but kept thinking about quitting. At some point he found the time to “protest his parents. It was really a great moment in my development. I became a man,” the jubilee boy once told APA. Seraphin attended the University of Music in Berlin and the Conservatory in Nuremberg and trained as an opera singer (baritone).

After his engagements in Switzerland and Germany, he was discovered by his close friend Otto Schenk and company as “Eisenstein” in the classic operetta “Die Fledermaus” by Johann Strauss. Then Serafin’s career took its course. She appeared in several operas, at the Volksoper in Vienna, at the Théâtre an der Wien and concerts in the United States and Japan followed.

In 1989, Seraphine underwent surgery on his vocal cords and decided to put aside singing, which he had already left as a gift to his two now successful children Daniel and Martina Seraphine. In 1992, he took on what had been a fairly successful opera stage on Lake Neusiedl. In the course of his administration, Mörbisch Seefestspiele made the proverb “Mecca of the operetta”. Seraphine turned everything upside down, reconstructing and expanding the stage, auditorium, technology and entrance area and, year after year, bringing more and more audiences to the North Burgenland community. Soon as many as 220,000 visitors came to Mörbisch each season.

Seraphine was often on the lake stage himself. In his speeches before the premiere, the artist insisted on targeting politicians who were present. After 20 years at the helm of the company, Seraphine finally quit in 2012 with “The Bat”. In 2015 he was awarded honorary membership of the Seefestspiele and the previous year on the Commander’s Cross with the Burgenland County Star.

A permanent entry in Austrian mass television consciousness apart from the operetta, Seraphine brought to the jury on the second season of ORF’s celebrity dance show “Dancing Stars” in 2006: “Wunderbar” in his ratings made him “Mister Wunderbar” – and known as such to younger audiences age. Seraphine has been a familiar face to more mature TV fans for some time as a regular guest on “Seitenblicke”.

For ORF, the audience favorite of “Serafin on tour” also traveled to the country as a cultural ambassador by visiting local festival sites until 2014 as part of the programme. In recent years, Kammersänger has been drawn to the stage time and time again. For example, in 2015, he was seen in the last directorial work of Helmut Löhner in Bob Larby’s “Schon wieder Sonntag” at the Kammerspiele of the Theater in Der Josefstadt next to Otto Schenk, or Daniel was in Schiller’s “Die Räuber” by Matthias Hartmann in a theater Salzburg State.

But now it will be celebrated – two days in a row. After all, his wife Ingeborg turned 80 on December 23. Seraphine has also been celebrated in the past, for which the jubilee has received numerous awards, including the Cross of Honor for Science and the Arts (2001) and the Gold Medal of Honor for the Federal Capital Vienna (2007). And since 2006, Harald Seraphin has been able to call himself a Knight of the Order of Services to Lithuania.