The baritone Thomas Bauer was a chorister at Regensburg Cathedral, and studied under Hanno Blaschke and Siegfried Mauser at the Munich Musikhochschule. He made his operatic début at the Prinzregententheater in Munich in 1997, going on to undertake leading rôles at the Salzburg Festival, the Ruhr Triennale and the Munich Biennale. He has worked together with a number of distinguished conductors, including Philippe Herreweghe, Jos van Immerseel, Ivan Fischer, Markus Stenz, Krzysztof Penderecki, Sigiswald Kuijken, Jos van Immerseel, and Peter Ruzicka, with performances at the Philharmonic Halls of Munich and Berlin, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, the Paris Cité de la Musique, the Teatro Solis in Montevideo, the Triphony Hall in Tokyo and in the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, among others. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Bavarian Federal Government and the Ernst von Siemens Music Endowment Fund. Other awards have come from the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris and the German Music Competition. For his excellent performances in the field of contemporary music, in 2003 he was awarded the first Schneider Schott Music Prize to be awarded to a vocalist. For his fine Lieder evening début in the old imperial city of Kyoto in Japan he received the 2003 Aoyama Music Award.