Michael Gielen


Michael Andreas Gielen was an Austrian conductor and composer who promoted contemporary music in opera and concert.
Raised in Argentina, he first worked in Vienna and was Generalmusikdirektor of the Royal Swedish Opera. He conducted notable world premieres such as György Ligeti's Requièm, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Carré, and Bernd Alois Zimmermann's opera Die Soldaten and his Requiem für einen jungen Dichter. He directed the Oper Frankfurt from 1977 to 1987, installing more contemporary operas, winning stage directors such as Hans Neuenfels and Ruth Berghaus, and reviving operas such as Schreker's Die Gezeichneten. During his era, the company became one of the leading operas.
Gielen was also principal conductor of the National Orchestra of Belgium, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra. As a composer, he worked in the tradition of the Second Viennese School, often setting modern literature to music. His works were premiered with performers such as Joan Carroll, Siegfried Palm, Aloys Kontarsky and the LaSalle Quartet.

Early years

Gielen was born in Dresden to Rose and. His father was a theatre and opera director from 1924 at the Staatstheater Dresden, who staged the premiere of Kaiser/Weill's Der Protagonist at the Semperoper in 1926. His mother Rose came from a Jewish family in Sambor. She was an actress who had given up acting when their first child Carola was born, but appeared occasionally, for example as a speaker in the premiere of Arnold Schönberg's Pierrot lunaire in Dresden in 1919, rehearsed with her brother Eduard Steuermann. The boy Michael first attended a reformed school from 1934 until it was closed by the Nazis. Both children were baptized and raised Catholic to counter Nazi indoctrination.
Clemens Krauss called Josef Gielen to the Staatsoper Berlin in 1936, where Michael attended primary school for a year, and then the Kaiserin-Augusta-Gymnasium. When his father's contract was dissolved in 1937, he found a position at the Vienna Burgtheater. The family followed there in 1938. Michael attended gymnasium and took piano lessons. Josef Gielen successfully staged at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1938 and 1939, and managed to get immigration papers for his wife and the two children. In 1940, the family left for Argentina, leaving most of their belongings behind.

Career

Gielen began his career as a pianist in Buenos Aires, where he studied with. As a répétiteur at the Teatro Colón at age 20, he was the pianist to accompany the recitatives, in the style of the time, in a performance of Bach's St Matthew Passion conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. In 1949, he gave an early performance of Arnold Schoenberg's complete piano works.
In 1950, Gielen moved to Vienna where his father had become director of the Burgtheater. Michael Gielen was conductor and répétiteur, who conducted at the Wiener Staatsoper from 1954 to 1960, assisting conductors such as Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan and Clemens Krauss. He conducted contemporary music outside the opera house.
, June 1965
His next operatic appointment, from 1960, was at the Royal Swedish Opera, where he was Generalmusikdirektor for the first time, until 1965. He conducted a production of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, which Ingmar Bergman staged as a radicalised Christian Passion, in the presence of the composer.
He took to freelance conducting in 1965, including the premiere of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's opera Die Soldaten in Cologne that year, a work that had been deemed to be impossible to perform. He premiered Aribert Reimann's opera Ein Traumspiel on 20 June 1965 at the Opernhaus Kiel. He then had a contract with the Netherlands Opera.
From 1977 to 1987, Gielen was GMD at the Oper Frankfurt, where he worked with the dramaturge Klaus Zehelein towards more contemporary operas. In 1979, he revived Schreker's opera Die Gezeichneten there, which had premiered in Frankfurt in 1918. During his time in Frankfurt, later called the Gielen Era, he collaborated with stage directors such as Hans Neuenfels for Verdi's Aida and Ruth Berghaus for Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. The time was described as the Ära Gielen/Zehelein and made Frankfurt an internationally recognised opera.
Gielen was also principal conductor of the Belgian National Orchestra and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. He was from 1986 to 1999 the conductor of the SWF Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden, and made it known as the leading orchestra for premieres, notably at the Donaueschinger Musiktage. From 1991, he collaborated in Berlin with the Staatsoper Unter den Linden and the Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester.
He demonstrated a mastery of the most complex contemporary scores, and conducted many premieres, including Helmut Lachenmann's Fassade and Klangschatten – mein Saitenspiel, György Ligeti's Requiem, and Karlheinz Stockhausen's Carré. He premiered Zimmermann's Requiem für einen jungen Dichter in Düsseldorf in 1969. In 1973 he recorded Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron, used as a soundtrack for the film Moses und Aron.
In October 2014, Gielen announced his retirement from conducting for health reasons, particularly seriously deteriorated eyesight. He died in Mondsee, Austria, on 8 March 2019 of pneumonia.

Compositions

Gielen began to compose in 1946, and kept composing throughout his career as a conductor. He was influenced by the tradition of the Second Viennese School, and his small oeuvre includes settings of poems by Hans Arp, Paul Claudel, Stefan George, and Pablo Neruda. His Die Glocken sind auf falscher Spur after Hans Arp was premiered in 1970 with soprano Joan Carroll, cellist Siegfried Palm, pianist Aloys Kontarsky, Wilhelm Bruck, Christoph Caskel and the composer at the Saarländischer Rundfunk festival, "Musik im 20.Jahrhundert" His string quartet Un vieux souvenir after Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, composed from 1983, was premiered in 1985 in Cincinnati by the LaSalle Quartet.
His compositions are listed by the Akademie der Künste: