Edited sentence: Although he excelled in the low bass parts, his top was very comfortable and he began experimenting with higher roles in the 1960s: Hans Sachs (at which he excelled), the Wanderer in Siegfried, and even Don Alphonso in Cosi Fan Tutte which is a high lyric baritone.Although he was not as tall as some other big basses, his stage-presence was formidable.From the mid 1940s through the late 1960s he was one of the three or four leading performers of Wagner's and Mozart's big bass roles, possessing the size and strength for the former and the dexterity, brains, and extreme range for the latter.He can be seen on video as Hans Sachs, Hagen, Rocco, and the Commendatore.He frequently appeared as Fafner, Hunding, and Hagen in the same performance of the Ring Cycle.He was not nearly as well-publicised as his frequent co-star Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, but Josef Greindl's recorded repetoire was almost equally wide, including most or all of the main bass roles by Gluck, Verdi, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Mussorsky, Smetena, Debussey, Berg, Orff, and Pfitzner; lieder by Schubert and Carl Loewe; and sacred music by Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Schubert, and Rossini.His earliest recorded singing was at Bayreuth, as Pogner the goldsmith (a character in his fifties or sixties) in 1943 when he (Greindl) was 31 years old.Josef Greindl had a voice like a gravel quarry--massive, wide, deep, rough, and ancient-sounding, grey-timbred rather than black