Georg Quander

Georg Quander (born 29 November 1950) is a German opera and film director, music journalist, writer and culture manager. From 1991 to 2002, he was artistic director of the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin. From 2005 to 2013, he was councillor for arts and culture of the city of Cologne. Since 2018, he has been the artistic director of the Musikkultur Rheinsberg gGmbH. Life and career Quander was born in Düsseldorf. Quander, the son of the veterinarian Joachim Quander, studied theatre studies, musicology, art history and at the FU Berlin after his Abitur in 1970 at the in Düsseldorf. He worked since 1973 during his studies as a dramaturge, freelance music journalist and author for various radio stations, newspapers and cultural institutions. From 1979, Quander was music editor at the then Sender Freies Berlin radio and television station (until 1987), and from 1988 to 1991 he worked as head of the music and entertainment department at the then Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor Berlin. From 1991 to 2002, he was artistic director of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden Berlin alongside the general music director Daniel Barenboim. During this time, he transformed the GDR state opera into a modern opera company and reduced the number of employees from around 1,400 to 700, without any scandals. In addition to the artistic re-profiling of the house, his main concern was to return the opera house Unter den Linden to the ranks of the world's leading opera houses, to which it had always belonged in its long history and before the Nazi era and German division. He engaged renowned directors such as Harry Kupfer, Patrice Chéreau, Dieter Dorn, Jürgen Flimm, and Peter Greenaway and brought in conductors such as Zubin Mehta, Claudio Abbado, Carlo Maria Giulini, Christoph von Dohnányi, Georg Solti and Michael Gielen regularly to the house. A particular focus of the work was the cultivation of the baroque and pre-classical operatic repertoire, most of which was realised in collaboration with the conductor René Jacobs and for the first time in the repertoire of a major opera house, consistently on original instruments in accordance with the findings of historical performance practice. In addition, Quander repeatedly commissioned world premières. In 2001, the Bremen Senate appointed him professor. As an honorary professor, he taught in the part-time course Music and Cultural Management at the Bremen University of Applied Sciences.