Olaf Bär gained his first experience as a singer at the Dresdner Kreuzchor, before he started his vocal studies at the Carl Maria von Weber University of Music in Dresden with Christian Elßner. As the winner of the first Walther Grüner Lieder Competition, Olaf Bär has launched an international career and is today considered to be one of the foremost Lieder interpreters of his generation.

The artist has since been invited by the foremost opera houses in Europe and the United States, for example by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden,  La Scala,  Frankfurt,  the Vienna and Berlin State Operas, in Rome, Napoli, Turin, Zurich, Paris, Amsterdam and Chicago. He is further at home with prestigious international festivals such as at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, Bayreuth Festival, the RuhrTriennale and the Wiener Festwochen. For many years Olaf Bär has been a regular guest at Dresden’s Semperoper.

Equally at home in concert hall and opera house, Olaf Bär’s concert repertory ranges from the Baroque to the contemporary, including Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Britten’s War Requiem and Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, among many other works. He has appeared with many of the world’s best renowned conductors including Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Georg Solti, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Bernarda Haitink, Kurt Masur, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Colin Davis, Hartmut Haenchen, Sir Simon Rattle, Riccardo Muti, Peter Schreier, Jeffrey Tate, Franz Welser-Möst, Adam Fischer, Mark Minkowski and Jun Märkl. Furthermore, Olaf Bär appears worldwide in recitals throughout Europe, Australia, Israel, Japan and America.

Future engagements include productions in Amsterdam, Paris, Napoli and Dresden and at the Wiener Festwochen, the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence as well as at the Theater an der Wien.

Olaf Bär has recorded numerous CDs and wide parts of the most important Lieder repertoire for EMI, Decca, Philips and many others.

In 1998 he received the Schumann award of the city of Zwickau. In 2004 he held a professorship at the Hochschule für Musik in Dresden teaching Lied.