Kurt Josef Schildknecht

Kurt Josef Schildknecht (born July 18, 1943 in Frauenfeld TG ) is an actor and director and was general director and managing director of the Saarland State Theater between 1991 and 2006 .

Originally an actor , among others in Peter Zadek's ensemble at the Schauspielhaus Bochum , he began his career in the 1970s as a director and artistic director of the Lucerne Open Air Theater . In 1976 he moved to the Graz stage as senior director and as a permanent director to the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna . Guest productions have taken him to theaters in Switzerland (including Basel) and in Germany (Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Hessisches Staatstheater Darmstadt and Saarländisches Staatstheater ). During this time he devoted himself not only to the classics, but also to younger dramatists such as Elfriede Jelinek and Samuel Beckett .

In 1985 he began his freelance career, which allowed him to continue working at the theater in der Josefstadt . He has also made guest appearances at the Vienna Volkstheater, the Nuremberg Opera, the Salzburg State Theater, in Bern, at the Geneva Opera and again at the Saarland State Theater. A number of works from this time are documented for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (especially Faust), for which he also worked as a radio play director.

In addition to managing the Bernese Dramatists' Workshop in 1988, Schildknecht had a teaching position at the Zurich Drama Academy.

During his general management he also brought numerous productions to the stages of the Saarland State Theater, for example in the plays " Faust I " and " Faust II " as well as " Iphigenie auf Tauris " ( Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ), " Medea " ( Euripides ), " The Persians " ( Aeschylus ) and "Oidipus / Antigone", " Le Tartuffe " ( Molière ), "The Life of Galileo " ( Bertolt Brecht ).

A particular success was Terrence McNally's "Master Class Maria Callas", which was on the program for six seasons in a row. His last production at the Saarland State Theater was Dürrenmatt's "The Visit of the Old Lady". In the field of opera, too, he has a number of his own productions: in addition to other " Salome ", " Der Rosenkavalier " and " Arabella " ( Richard Strauss ), " La traviata " ( Giuseppe Verdi ) and most recently " Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny " ( Kurt Weill ). In addition, an extremely successful musical series was established during his directorship, during which he himself staged the world premieres of Frank Nimsgern's "Paradise of Pain" ( 1998 ) and " Les Misérables " ( 2002 ).

After a lengthy dispute with the then Saarland minister of education Jürgen Schreier about intended budget cuts, Schildknecht ended his directorship in Saarbrücken in 2006. Since then, Kurt Josef Schildknecht has been working freelance again.

He is married to the soprano Barbara Gilbert .

literature

• Julia Danielczyk: Kurt Josef Schildknecht . In: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theater Lexikon der Schweiz . Volume 3, Chronos, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-0340-0715-9 , p. 1604.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Theater dispute Schildknecht - Schreier ( Memento of the original from April 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.