Susanna Goldberg

Susanna Goldberg was born in Innsbruck and read German Studies, Comparative Literature and Art History at the city’s University. She began her professional career working on a number of research projects, including one focusing on the Austrian National Library’s collection of manuscripts, while also giving lectures and publishing on Austrian art and literature in the 20th century. Among the writers in whom she has taken an editorial and literary interest are Karl Kraus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Musil, Georg Trakl, Heimito von Doderer, Ingeborg Bachmann and Oswald Wiener, but it is Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando who has been central to her research. The editorial guidelines that she laid down in her doctoral dissertation were the starting point for her edition of Herzmanovsky-Orlando’s collected works that was published by Residenz Verlag in Salzburg between 1983 and 1994. She edited five of the ten volumes. A documentary study on Herzmanovsky-Orlando’s life and works was published in Salzburg in 1994 under the title Sinfonietta Canzonetta Austriaca (co-author Maximilian Reinisch). Between 1988 and 1995 Susanna Goldberg was a member of the Advisory Board of Translators of the Austrian Ministry for Education and Art.

After a short period as dramaturge at the Vienna Burgtheater in 1988/89, Susanna Goldberg began to gravitate from academia to the theatre, starting to work with Barrie Kosky as his co-author and dramaturge in 2001. From the outset their joint interests have focused on Jewish cultural history. For the Vienna Schauspielhaus they developed their ‘Jewtopia’ trilogy comprising Dafke!! (2002), Der verlorene Atem (2003, staged as The Lost Breath at the Melbourne International Arts Festival) and Das Schloss (2005). They also devised a version of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice for the Schauspiel Frankfurt in 2012. In 2015 Susanna Goldberg worked with Ulrich Lenz as dramaturge on Barrie Kosky’s production of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron at the Komische Oper in Berlin. Orphée aux enfers marks Susanna Goldberg’s Salzburg Festival debut.