General director of the Saarländisches Staatstheater since the 2025/26 season

Director Michael Schulz has been General Director of the Saarländisches Staatstheater since the beginning of the 2025/26 season. From 2008 to 2025 he served as General Director of Musiktheater im Revier Gelsenkirchen, where he shaped the company’s artistic profile with stylistically wide-ranging and distinctive productions.

He has established an international reputation with productions of major works of the repertoire. At the Salzburg Easter Festival, under the musical direction of Christian Thielemann, he staged Wagner’s Parsifal – a production later presented as the Chinese premiere at the Polytheater in Beijing. In Weimar he directed the complete Ring des Nibelungen, while in Budapest he staged Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Further acclaimed productions include Strauss’s Elektra (Landestheater Linz), Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito (Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Düsseldorf), Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (Oper Leipzig), Salome (Semperoper Dresden), Giordano’s Andrea Chénier (Staatstheater Kassel), and world premieres such as Gurlitt’s Nana (Weimar). His productions of Parsifal and the Weimar Ring have been released on DVD and received multiple awards.

As a guest director, he has worked with houses such as the Komische Oper Berlin, the state theatres in Darmstadt, Kassel, Hanover, and Nuremberg, the Aalto-Musiktheater Essen, and the theatres in Bremen, Bielefeld, Erfurt, Osnabrück, Koblenz, and Lübeck. He has also been engaged by leading festivals including the Salzburg Easter Festival, the Wagner Weeks in Budapest, the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festival, the European Weeks in Passau, the Kammeroper Schloss Rheinsberg, and the International Opera Festival Miskolc.

In 1998, Schulz became the first recipient of the newly established Götz Friedrich Prize for Young Directors in Berlin for his staging of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites.

He began his career as stage director at the Staatstheater Kassel, before serving as Principal Director at the Aalto-Musiktheater Essen (1997–2001) and Opera Director at the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar (2002–2008). Michael Schulz studied opera direction at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg.

2025-08-11