Andrea Breth
Director
© Bernd Uhlig
Andrea Breth recently directed Madame Butterfly (2024) and Salome (2022) at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence. She started her career directing plays. Productions at the Städtische Bühnen in Freiburg, where she was house director from 1983 - 1985 resulted in invitations to the Theatertreffen in Berlin (a great honour) and her being named Director of the Year by Theater heute magazine. She moved to the Schauspielhaus in Bochum in 1986, where she gradually found her niche in the German speaking theatre world. She was Artistic Director of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin from 1992 - 1997 and house director at the Burg Theatre in Vienna from 1999 - 2019. She made her operatic debut in 2005, with Carmen at the Styriarte Festival in Graz. This was followed by very successful productions ofEugene Onegin at the Salzburg Festival in 2007, Janáček's Káťa Kabanová (2010), Verdi's La traviata (2012) and Dallapiccola's Il prigioniero (2018), and works including Britten's Turn of the Screw (2021) at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, Berg's Wozzeck (2011) at the Staatsoper im Schillertheater Berlin, Wolfgang Rihm's Jakob Lenz at Stuttgart State Opera (2014), a Bartók Bluebeard's Castle and Schumann Geistervariationen double bill at the Festwochen in Vienna (2015), Manon Lescaut at the Nationale Opera in Amsterdam (2016) and Cherubini's Médée at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin (2018). She has won many prizes and awards for her work, including the Nestroy Theaterpreis (2003, 2011, 2016, 2019), the Berlin Theaterpreis (2006), the 2009 Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and the Arts, the Bundesverdienstkreuz (2015, 2019), the 2015 German „Der Faust“ Theater Prize, the Order "Pour le Mérite“ (2018) and Austria's 2022 Music Theatre Prize.