NEW YORK, NY.- Benjamin Luxon, a warm-voiced British baritone who was admired for his singing of German and British song and his robust opera performances, but whose flourishing career was cut short by encroaching deafness, died July 25 at his home in Sandisfield, Massachusetts. He was 87.

His son Daniel said the cause was colon cancer.

At the height of his career, in the 1970s and ’80s, Luxon was one of the most sought-after singers on British, American and continental operatic stages, in roles like Don Giovanni, Eugene Onegin and Falstaff, as well as in the operas of Benjamin Britten.

Britten created the title role of the 1971 television opera “Owen Wingrave,” based on a Henry James short story, specifically for Luxon. Luxon’s thoughtful singing of Franz Schubert, Hugo Wolf and English song was praised by critics in England and the U.S. for its subtlety.

He moved with ease among folk song, art song and even English music hall favorites, explaining to interviewers that he had grown up singing in church and school choirs in his native Cornwall in England. “It was like breathing; it was like second nature to me,” he said.

But his singing days were curtailed when, in the late 1980s, he developed a hearing affliction that led to partial deafness and some disastrous misfires on the recital stage. He bore the condition stoically, but by the mid-1990s he was forced to largely give up singing despite using a hearing aid.

Luxon later had a second career as a narrator onstage and an actor, became a U.S. citizen and moved to western Massachusetts.

Long before, he had been part of a cadre of British singers, men and women, who, through their rich-toned seriousness, defined a particular kind of vocal artistry that had few equals in the 1960s and ’70s. For Luxon, it came down to intensive preparation, sympathy for the texts he sang and strong characterization in operatic roles.

“He uses his warm, sympathetic baritone with commendable artistry to evoke character,” British opera critic Alan Blyth wrote in the 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, when Luxon’s career was in full bloom. “And on the concert platform his histrionic powers are modified by an extra care for line and words.”

Those traits are in evidence in a 1972 recording of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Songs and Dances of Death,” in which Luxon is alive to the text but where the vocal drama never overpowers the thundering piano part.

By the time he made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1980, in the title role of Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” the 42-year-old was a confident stage performer who could easily win over critics while outshining others onstage.

“The baritone’s easy command of the stage, and disarmingly natural bearing, created an eminently believable Byronic hero, all suave condescension and superiority early in the opera,” New York Times critic Peter G. Davis wrote of that debut, noting that Luxon had supplied “what little distinction there was” in the performance.

Earlier, he had made his mark both in Britten — “his well-supported mezza-voce is effectively used at several points,” Gramophone magazine wrote of a recording of “The Rape of Lucretia” in 1971 — and in the English song, in which Luxon excelled.

He continued to sing throughout the 1980s, appearing at La Scala in Milan in 1986 and in Los Angeles in Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” in 1988. But by 1992 his hearing problem had become too pronounced to ignore; a concert at Weill Recital Hall in New York was a “nightmare,” Luxon recalled in an interview with James R. Oestreich of the Times in 1994.

“The problem is that most of my high-frequency hearing has gone,” he said. Oestreich wrote that Luxon was “remarkably equable under the circumstances, showing no trace of self-pity.”

Benjamin Matthew Luxon was born in Redruth, in Cornwall, on March 24, 1937, the only child of Ernest Luxon, an amateur singer and laborer, and Lucille (Grigg) Luxon. In a 1979 interview, he recalled taking part in and attending “endless concerts” as a boy in Cornwall while going to schools there.

After working as a physical education teacher, he studied singing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and won a prize at the ARD International Music Competition in Munich in 1961. It propelled his career.

In 1963, he toured the Soviet Union as a member of the English Opera Group, a small opera troupe that Britten had founded and that led the composer to create the “Owen Wingrave” role in 1971.

Dozens of recordings followed — Luxon made more than 100 — until he began to experience hearing loss in 1988. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, what is this,’” he said in 2009.

In addition to his son Daniel, he is survived by another son, Jonathan; his daughters, Rachel Luxon-Robinson and Emily Fuchs; his wife, Susan Crofut, whom he married in 2002; 14 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. An earlier marriage, to Israeli soprano Sheila Amit, ended in divorce in 2002.

Hearing aids and an implant helped Luxon for a time, but they couldn’t replace what he had lost. A singer must be able to hear.

“It’s difficult,” he told Oestreich in 1994. “You know, there’s nothing wrong with my stupid voice. This is what’s so frustrating.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.