From Salzburg via Berlin to Zurich
06/12/21 It still takes until he takes office, but the course has been set: Matthias Schulz will be the director of the Zurich Opera House at the beginning of the 2025/26 season. Schulz, who was concert director of the Salzburg Festival for many years and then artistic director of the Mozarteum Foundation, is now director of the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden.
The 44-year-old Matthias Schulz will succeed Andreas Homoki in Zurich, who has been running the hotel since 2012 and will be stepping down in 2025 at his own request. “In the interests of continuity”, Schulz will be available to the house as early as summer 2024 “for organic handover and induction”. The assessment committee voted unanimously in favor of Schulz. The previous director appreciates Schul’s “calm and determined manner” – a character trait that one has been able to appreciate in him over the years, even in Salzburg.
Matthias Schulz was born in Bad Reichenhall (Bavaria) in 1977 and studied piano in Salzburg and economics in Munich. Matthias Schulz has a longstanding relationship with the Salzburg Festival. From the age of 22 he worked as a director and was no longer responsible for project management, concert and media consultant and in 2009 for concert planning. In this position he was responsible for helping to design the program as well as for scheduling and linking all the relevant festival productions. During the years of this collaboration, a focus was placed on the field of contemporary music theater.
In 2012 Matthias Schulz moved to the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg as artistic director and commercial director in personal union. In addition to programming the festival and concert programs as well as other responsibilities in the two other core areas of the foundation, science and museums, his work as finance and personnel manager also extends to fundraising, marketing, press work and media productions.
Finally, Schulz was acquired as the designated artistic director of the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden. After a transition phase as co-director, he has carried out the office in full since April 2018. The move back in and the opening after seven years of general renovation, the shaping of the program by commissioned works and their premieres, the re-establishment of the international festival Baroque days and the new series for experimental music theater Linden 21 is one of the essential tasks and achievements.
The promotion of young talent and education programs such as the founding of a new children’s opera orchestra in cooperation with all of Berlin’s local music schools and the expansion of the Berlin Children’s Opera House with broadcasts in ten Berlin districts are central to his work.
The Zurich Opera House, together with the Zurich Ballet, the Zurich Philharmonic and the Opera Choir, for the highest musical and staging quality, lively and diverse operatic repertoire, impulses through modernity and the maintenance of historical performance practice, so the designated director in an initial statement. “These essential components of the house need to be further developed and enriched with bold new perspectives. It is very important to me to show that artistic passion and economic expertise are not automatically mutually exclusive. “
“Matthias Schulz will be an ideal actor for the important process of cultural change with issues relevant to society as a whole, such as openness, equality, diversity, inclusion, sustainability and participation, which the opera house is already actively addressing,” says Jacqueline Fehr, the side of politics at Was a member of the examination committee. (Zurich Opera House / dpk-krie)