Profile: Daniel Teadt, the Storytelling Baryton

PHOTO BY ELAN MIZRAHI

After high school, Daniel Teadt was accomplished enough to be accepted into a university voice program, but he entered college as an English literature major.

“Honestly, I love to sing, but I loved the stories behind what I was singing, almost equally,” says the baryton-Martin (a high, lyric baritone), who has appeared in major roles with companies in Pittsburgh and across the globe.

Today, at age 49, he’s still telling those stories through performances and as a full-time voice professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he’s worked since 2011.

He started pursuing music at a young age because he loved to sing but also because he wanted to do anything his older sister did. She joined the high school choir, so Teadt did, too.

“I really just kind of fell in love with it,” he says.

He considered going to music school for voice; he auditioned and was accepted to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, taking music and English classes.

The epic nature of opera appealed to him, and he began to make connections between literature and pieces of music, drawing lines from opera to baroque music to 20th-century British composer Benjamin Britten.

After college, he joined the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, then the San Francisco Opera — then he came to Pittsburgh to work as an apprentice with Pittsburgh Opera, and he’s been here ever since.

“I started my career outside of Pittsburgh, but then always had a home here [artistically],” he says.

As a singer and recitalist, he’s performed with numerous companies and at festivals around the world. His concert highlights include Grammy Award-winning performances with the London Symphony Orchestra and guest appearances with symphonies and operas around the globe.

His students have gone on to work in every genre from heavy metal to musical theater.

“One of my students is writing a musical about [J.R.R. Tolkien’s] Gollum … I’ve got one who’s in Nashville as a songwriter,” he says. “And I think my biggest joy is not necessarily seeing them just succeed in the things that we talked about, but seeing … they had the confidence to reach out and to go in many different directions.”

One of his students also was a longtime Pittsburgh colleague: Resonance Works founder and Artistic and General Director Maria Sensi Sellner.

Sellner says she went to Teadt because she wanted to reconnect with her own singing post-pandemic and needed someone she trusted to help her. Teadt has worked with Resonance Works since their second-ever performance in 2014; he’s now a member of their board of directors.

“Not every wonderful professional artist is such an effective teacher, educator, pedagogue, as he is,” Sellner says. “I can always tell when I’m hearing a student that studies with Dan because of their impeccable musicianship, because of the freedom he has helped them to discover in their voices. I think he’s one of the best teachers that is teaching in this region.”

Teadt, who lives in Morningside with his wife and two sons, says one benefit of working as a professional artist and teaching is being able to share real-world experience with his students.

“I can bring things from one aspect of my life into the other one, and then really share that with the students, which is great. I think they enjoy the experience of having somebody who’s out there working and get what they’re trying to do.”

This fall, he performed concerts with Resonance Works’ professional octet, Reson8, and played Sen. Joseph McCarthy in “Fellow Travelers” at Pittsburgh Opera. In April, Teadt will be singing John Adams’ “The Wound-Dresser,” which features excerpts from the Walt Whitman poem of the same name, with Daniel Curtis conducting the CMU Philharmonic.

“One thing sort of feeds into the other thing,” he says. “It’s hard to stay away from opportunity sometimes where somebody is saying, ‘Hey, you should do this thing.’ And I’m like, ‘Great, now I can maybe do a class at CMU that incorporates that knowledge.’

“There’s a balancing act, for sure, but it’s all been rewarding for me.”

Lauren Davidson is a former associate editor at Pittsburgh Magazine and has covered the region for nearly 20 years. A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, she lives in Swissvale with her husband, four children and one cat.