Klaus Bertisch

Klaus Bertisch studied English and German language and literature, arts education and pedagogy at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. He began his career as a dramaturg at the Frankfurt Opera during the era of Michael Gielen and Klaus Zehelein. Invitations soon followed to work at the opera houses of Freiburg, Mannheim, Essen and Gelsenkirchen, at the Vienna Volksoper, La Monnaie in Brussels, and at the Ludwigsburg Festival. From 1987 to 1990 he worked as a dramaturg and author for the Siemens Kulturprogramm in Munich. From 1990 to 2018 he was chief dramaturg at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam.

More recently Klaus Bertisch has also been active as a director, specializing in staged song recitals with artists including Marlis Petersen, Olaf Bär, Wolfgang Holzmair and Mojca Erdmann. He has also directed Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe and Shostakovich’s unfinished opera The Gamblers, as well as Georg Kreisler’s musical Heute Abend: Lola Blau. He has worked with many leading directors: with Willy Decker in Amsterdam, Leipzig, Dresden, Barcelona and at the Salzburg Festival; with Dale Duesing at the Berlin State Opera; with Floris Visser at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, at the Karlsruhe State Theatre and at Glyndebourne Festival; with Pierre Audi in Amsterdam, Brussels, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Paris and at the Salzburg Festival, the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the Holland Festival and the Ruhrtriennale; with Andrea Breth in Amsterdam, Brussels and Aix-en-Provence; and with Christof Loy in Amsterdam, at the Salzburg Festival and at the Theater an der Wien. He regularly produced his own projects at the Delft Chamber Music Festival. He teaches at the Dutch National Opera Academy in Amsterdam and has also worked at the University of Amsterdam, the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and the Academy of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. His publications in Germany include the anthology Schwanenmärchen, a book about the director Ruth Berghaus, the first German biography of the Dutch composer Leo Smit, Unerhörtes Talent, and a contribution to the catalogue for the Berlin exhibition Theater im Sucher about the photographer Ruth Walz.