La Scala is an opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as the Nuovo Regio Ducale Teatro alla Scala. The premiere performance was Antonio Salieri's Europa riconosciuta.
The Salzburg Festival is a prominent festival of music and drama established in 1920. It is held each summer in the Austrian town of Salzburg, the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. One highlight is the annual performance of the play Jedermann (Everyman) by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
Jürgen Flimm is a German theater and opera director, and theater manager. After establishing himself as one of the exponents of Regietheater, Flimm was called to manage renowned theaters and festivals. His operatic productions in Germany led to an international career, with operas staged in the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, England, Italy, and the United States.
Peter Sellars is an American theatre director, noted for his unique contemporary stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays. Sellars is professor at UCLA, where he teaches Art as Social Action and Art as Moral Action. He is widely regarded as one of the key figures of theatre and opera of the last 50 years.
Daniel César Martin Brühl González Domingo is a Spanish-German actor. He began his work at a young age in a German soap opera called Verbotene Liebe in 1995. In 2003, his starring role in the German film Good Bye, Lenin! received wider recognition and critical acclaim which garnered him the European Film Award for Best Actor and the German Film Award for Best Actor. Brühl has worked in both European and American productions in several languages.
Anna Yuryevna Netrebko is a Russian operatic soprano who has an active international career and performs prominently at the Salzburg Festival, Metropolitan Opera, Vienna State Opera, and Royal Opera, London.
Harry Alfred Robert Kupfer was a German opera director and academic. A long-time director at the Komische Oper Berlin, he worked at major opera houses and at festivals internationally. Trained by Walter Felsenstein, he worked in the tradition of realistic directing. At the Bayreuth Festival, he staged Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer in 1978 and Der Ring des Nibelungen in 1988. At the Salzburg Festival, he directed the premiere of Penderecki's Die schwarze Maske in 1986 and Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss in 2014.
Herbert Wernicke was a German opera director and a set and costume designer. He was born in Auggen, Baden-Württemberg. He studied piano, flute, and directing at the conservatory in Braunschweig and set design at the academy in Munich. After starting out as set and costume designer in Landshut and Wuppertal, and directing his first play in Darmstadt, he directed his first opera, Handel's Belshazzar, in 1978 in Darmstadt. The majority of Wernicke's artistic work was at the theater in Basel, where he lived since 1990.
Diana Damrau is a German soprano. She has been successful in coloratura soprano roles, especially admired as the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute and Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos. She has gradually proceeded into 19th-century Italian bel canto repertoire, singing roles such as Violetta in La traviata and the title role in Lucia di Lammermoor. Damrau is also known as a lieder singer.
Johannes Schaaf was a German film, theatre and opera director and actor. Several of his films have been internationally recognized. His focus shifted to opera in the 1980s and he worked with many of the leading international opera houses within Europe, and was invited to direct at several renowned opera houses in the United States and Asia.
Kristian Kiehling is a Danish-born German television, film and stage actor and filmmaker. In Germany he is known for Autobahnraser (2004), Tsunami (2005) and Verbotene Liebe (2013); and in Britain for All the Small Things (2009) and Will (2011). In January 2014, Kiehling became a regular in the British soap opera EastEnders, playing Aleks Shirovs. He left the show in 2015 due to a contractual dispute. His directorial debut, Chronicle of a Summer in Europe, was premiered as the documentary centerpiece at the Lighthouse International Film Festival in 2016.
Jacques Schmidt was a French costume designer, who collaborated regularly with stage directors Antoine Bourseiller, Patrice Chéreau and Roger Planchon.
Damiano Michieletto is an Italian stage director especially known for opera. He has staged productions at leading opera houses and festivals worldwide. His awards include the 2015 Laurence Olivier Award for the production of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci at the Royal Opera House in London.
Rudolf Sellner, born Gustav Rudolf Sellner? was a German actor, dramaturge, stage director, and intendant. He represented in the 1950s a radical Instrumentales Theater. After decades of acting and directing plays, he turned to staging operas, and was a long-time intendant of the Deutsche Oper Berlin from 1961, when the Berlin Wall was built. He staged notable world premieres, including Ernst Barlach's play Der Graf von Ratzeburg in 1951, Ionesco's Mörder ohne Bezahlung in 1958, Giselher Klebe's Alkmene in 1961 for the opening of the Deutsche Oper, and Aribert Reimann's opera Melusine in 1971.
Günter Krämer is a German stage director, especially for opera, and a theatre manager who has staged internationally.
Lydia Steier is an American opera director who has made an international career based in Germany. She directed the Swiss premiere of Stockhausen's Donnerstag aus Licht, chosen by critics as "Best Production of the Year" in 2016. In 2018, she became the first woman to stage Mozart's Die Zauberflöte at the Salzburg Festival, for the opening performance in 2018.
Editta Braun is an Austrian choreographer, stage dancer, dance pedagogue as well as founder and director of the Salzburg dance company Editta Braun Company. She is known as a pioneer of contemporary dance in Austria and chairwoman of tanz_house, the association of freelance choreographers based in Salzburg.
Georg Quander (born 29 November 1950 is a German opera and film director, music journalist, writer and culture manager. From 1991 to 2002, he was artistic director of the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin. From 2005 to 2013, he was councillor for arts and culture of the city of Cologne. Since 2018, he has been the artistic director of the Musikkultur Rheinsberg gGmbH.
Elsa Dreisig is a French-Danish operatic soprano. Based at the Berlin State Opera, she made an European career in both opera and concert. Her opera roles include, besides the standard lyric soprano repertoire such as Mozart's Fiordiligi and Bizet's Micaëla, Baroque opera such as Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, and the world premiere of Beat Furrer's Violetter Schnee.
Gustav Kuhn is an Austrian conductor and manager, also a composer, and a teacher and author. During his international conducting career, he founded the later "Accademia di Montegral" for young musicians and singers in 1987, held the artistic directorship of the Tiroler Festspiele Erl, which he founded, for over 20 years and was artistic director of the international singing competition "Neue Stimmen" of the Bertelsmann Foundation since the competition was founded in 1987. Due to the accusations against Kuhn, he ended the collaboration in September 2018.
