Youngest director once in Salzburg
04.10.22 At the Salzburg Festival he directed only once: 1967, Mozarts Ascanio in Alba. That was in the era when Leopold Hager was gradually revitalizing Mozart’s early operas. At this time, Hellmuth Matiasek was no longer director of the Salzburg State Theater.
Matiasek, born in Vienna in 1931, came to Salzburg in 1962, when he was the youngest theater manager in the German-speaking world. In 1953, Matiasek already had the avant-garde theater when he was a student kaleidoscope Founded in Vienna, today’s Ateliertheater. In 1955 he staged for the first time in the Salzburg State Theater. From 1960 he worked under the direction of Oscar Fritz Schuh at the Municipal Theater in Cologne.
Hellmuth Matiasek only stayed in Salzburg for a short time, in 1964 at the Staatstheater Braunschweig. The Wuppertal theaters are also in charge, but the theater man spent most of his long life in Bavaria. In 1972, the director, who trained at the Max Reinhardt Seminar and received his doctorate from the University of Vienna with a thesis on the “comic of the clown”, took over the management of the Otto Falckenberg Academy in Munich, one of the most respected training centers in Germany. He remained its leader until 1979.
In 1983 he was appointed artistic director of the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz, which he headed until 1996. From 2000 to 2003 he was President of the Bavarian Theater Academy. For ten years, Matiasek followed the Carl Orff Festival in Andechs, Upper Bavaria.
There is hardly a well-known theater or an opera stage in Germany and Austria where Hellmuth Martiasek, who was married to the actress Cornelia Froboess, does not direct. He died in Rosenheim on April 7th at the age of ninety. (dpk-krie)