Youngest manager once in Salzburg

10/04/22 I’ve only been out at the Salzburg Festival once: 1967, Mozart Ascanio in Alba. This was the era when Leopold Hagar was gradually reviving Mozart’s early operas. At this time, Helmuth Matiasek was no longer director of the Salzburg State Theatre.

Matjasek, born in Vienna in 1931, came to Salzburg in 1962, when he was the youngest theater director in the German-speaking world. In 1953, Matyasek already had avant-garde theater when he was a student kaleidoscope Founded in Vienna, the current theater. In 1955 he made his debut at the Salzburg State Theatre. From 1960 he worked under Oskar Fritz Schuh at the Municipal Theater in Cologne.

Hellmuth Matiasek only stayed in Salzburg for a short time, in 1964 he went to Staatstheater Braunschweig. He also headed the Wuppertal theaters, but the theater man spent most of his long life in Bavaria. In 1972, the director, who was trained at the Max Reinhardt seminar and received his doctorate from the University of Vienna with a thesis on “clown comics”, took over the management of the Otto Falkenberg Academy in Munich, one of the most famous 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 ran the Karl Orff Festival in Andex, Upper Bavaria.

There is hardly a famous theater or opera stage in Germany and Austria where Helmuth Martisek, who was married to actress Cornelia Frobus, did not direct it. He died in Rosenheim on 7 April at the age of ninety. (dpk- cree)