Sebastian Baumgarten
Born in East Berlin in 1969, he trained as an opera director at the Hochschule für Musik «Hanns Eisler» Berlin. From 1999 to 2002 he was Resident Director for Music Theatre at Staatstheater Kassel and from 2003 to 2005 he was Principal Director at the Meininger Theater. Baumgarten has won numerous awards for his work spanning the boundaries between spoken and music theatre. For his production of «Orestes» in 2006 at the Komische Oper Berlin he was voted Director of the Year by the critics in the annual poll for «Opernwelt» magazine. In 2011 he opened the 100th Bayreuth Festival with Wagner’s «Tannhäuser». In 2013 his Zurich production of Brecht’s «St. Joan of the Stockyards» was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen. Sebastian Baumgarten directs at leading opera houses and theatres in Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Zurich, Copenhagen, Leipzig, Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden, Basel and Stuttgart. Since 2013 he has led the Directing course at the «August Everding» Theatre Academy in Munich. With «Danton’s Death» he will be directing his debut production in Munich.
Productions
«Danton’s Death», written by the 22-year-old Georg Büchner in a mere five weeks in 1835 following extensive research, is based on historical sources and documents from the French Revolution, whose maxims of «liberty, equality and fraternity» shaped our understanding of modern European democracies. However, Büchner does not tell of the triumphant beginnings, the storming of the Bastille as part of a popular uprising that continues to be celebrated today, focusing instead on a few days towards the end of the Jacobins’ so-called reign of terror in the spring of 1794.
Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death)
«Peer, you’re lying!»: Henrik Ibsen immediately highlights the key theme of his dramatic poem in its opening line – the blurred boundary between illusion and reality. Because Peer, whose youth is shaped by the poverty of his farming background, continually reinvents himself with the aid of stories, lies and the arts of fabulation – as a cosmopolitan, a colonial master and even an Emperor.
Peer Gynt