Stefan Herheim

Career Trajectory

Stefan Herheim emerged from his studies under Götz Friedrich with a 1999 graduation production of Die Zauberflöte that signaled an artist of uncommon imaginative reach. His 2003 Salzburg Festival production of Die Entführung aus dem Serail marked his international breakthrough, establishing him as a director of psychological depth and formal innovation. Over two decades of work at Europe's finest houses—from Bayreuth to Stuttgart to the Metropolitan Opera—he has become recognized as one of opera's most consequential contemporary interpreters, celebrated for stagings that interrogate text and music with equal intellectual rigor.