Svatopluk Sem

Biography

Svatopluk Sem, a soloist of the National Theatre Opera in Prague, made his debut at the Prague State Opera in 2008 as Marcello in Puccini's La bohème and the following year on the stage of the National Theatre as the Devil in Bohuslav Martinů's opera The Miracles of Mary.

He studied singing at the Conservatory in České Budějovice. After graduating, he joined the South Bohemian Theatre as an opera soloist. At the National Theatre and the State Opera he has performed, for example, Don Giovanni (Mozart: Don Giovanni), Guglielmo (Mozart: Così fan tutte), Belcore (Donizetti: L’elisir d‘amore), Germont (Verdi: La traviata), Renato (Verdi: Un ballo in maschera), Wolfram of Eschenbach (Wagner: Tannhäuser), Klingsor (Wagner: Parsifal), Gérard (Giordano: Andrea Chénier), Gianni Schicchi, the Forester (Janáček: The Cunning Little Vixen), Escamillo (Bizet: Carmen), Smetana's Přemysl (Libuše), Vladislav (Dalibor), and Kalina (The Secret).
In April 2016, he appeared alongside Karita Matilla at the prestigious BBC Proms Festival at London's Royal Albert Hall as Jaroslav Prus in a performance of Janáček's The Makropulos Affair with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and in the same year in Janáček's Jenůfa as the Mill Foreman. He regularly collaborates with the National Theatre in Brno, the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre in Ostrava and the J. K. Tyl Theatre in Pilsen. He has also appeared as the Forester at the Teatro Regio in Turin. In 2018, he took part in the European opera project OperaVision, where he sang Přemysl (National Theatre Prague) and the Forester (National Theatre Brno). He also performed as the Gamekeeper in The Cunning Little Vixen at the Teatro Regio in Turin directed by Robert Carsen, as well as at the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava. In 2025, he made his debut in the same role at the Norwegian National Opera, and in 2026, he appeared as the Gamekeeper at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin in a new production conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, under whose baton he also performed in a concert performance of The Makropulos Case with the London Symphony Orchestra. He performed in Bohuslav Martinů’s Czech Rhapsody at The Houston Symphony’s season-opening concert under the baton of conductor Juraj Valčuha. A regular guest at domestic and international music festivals, he has appeared at the BBC Proms, the Savonlinna Opera Festival, the International Music Festival Český Krumlov, Dvořák Prague, the Prague Spring Festival, and Smetana’s Litomyšl National Festival. In Asia, his appearances include the Hong Kong Arts Festival and the Shanghai International Arts Festival. In the summer of 2026, he performed at the Bregenz Festival as Svatopluk Čech in Leoš Janáček’s opera The Excursions of Mr. Brouček, conducted by Robert Jindra.

For Harmonia Mundi, he made a recording of Smetana's The Bartered Bride in the role of Krušina with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2011. He is the winner of the Opera+ Opera Portal Award 2017, the Thalia Award 2017 (for his portrayal of Giorgio Germont in Verdi's La traviata) and the Moravian-Silesian Jantar Award 2017 (for the role of Kalina in Smetana's The Secret). He has won the Karel Roden Award in České Budějovice three times.