Joachim Rathke

Joachim Rathke was born in Kiel and studied musicology and Romance studies in Hamburg, and opera directing at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin. His engagements as an assistant director took him to Theater Kiel, the Folkoperan in Stockholm, the Braunschweig State Theatre and the Frankfurt Opera.
In 1998 he was engaged as a head staff director at the Berlin State Opera. Since 2001 he has worked as a freelance director. He has directed productions in Aachen (La traviata), Regensburg (La bohème), Koblenz (Il trovatore), Halle (Rigoletto, Der fliegende Holländer), Salzburg (Hänsel und Gretel), at the festival Opera Engiadina in St Moritz (Lucrezia Borgia, Un giorno di regno, Otello), at the Irish National Opera and at the Oper im Park Festival in Riehen.
As a co-director collaborating with Christoph Marthaler, he has worked at the Paris Opéra, the Zurich Opera House, the Teatro Real in Madrid, the National Theatre in Warsaw, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Theater Basel and the Ruhrtriennale. He and Georges Delnon co-directed the world premiere of Philipp Maintz’s opera Maldoror at the Munich Biennale.
His other productions include John Adams’s I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, Anno Schreier’s Kein Ort. Nirgends and Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole at the Opera Factory Freiburg, and Antônio Carlos Gomes’s Lo Schiavo and Giovanni Pacini’s Maria Tudor at the Gießen State Theatre.
Lecturing activities have taken him to the University of Music and Theatre ‘Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’ in Leipzig, the Nuremberg University of Music, Mahidol University in Bangkok and the University of Television and Film in Munich. Most recently he has directed Orpheus in the Underworld at the Nuremberg University of Music and Madama Butterfly and Alessandro Scarlatti’s Il Cambise at Theater Kiel, and created the plays Überlebende am Strand und Überlebende im All in Plön.