It is a great pleasure for Rieder Promotions to have been entrusted the exclusive world wide management of Katharina Wagner in fall 2009 in addition to the tour management of the Bayreuth Festival. On 1 September 2008 Katharina Wagner and her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier were appointed new artistic directors of the Bayreuth Festival.
The great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner, Katharina Wagner was born in Bayreuth in 1978. She studied dramatics at Berlin's Free University and now lives in Berlin and Bayreuth. As a student she was already assisted other directors, including Keith Warner and Harry Kupfer at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden and at the New National Theatre in Tokyo.
Katharina Wagner has worked as a production assistant at the Bayreuth Festival since 1996 while also sharing the Festival's administrative duties. Own productions include Der fliegende Holländer in Würzburg in 2002, Lohengrin in Budapest in 2004 and Lortzing's Der Waffenschmied at Munich's Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in 2005. Her production of Puccini's Il trittico at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin in 2006 marked her début in Germany´s capital.
For her Festival début as a director in 2007 she chose Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, demonstrating once more that she is one of Germany's most exceptional and promising young directors. The production was publicly broadcast during the Siemens Festspielnacht 2008 to an audience of 40.000 people and also recorded on DVD.
In October 2008 she staged Rienzi in Bremen. Only two weeks before the festival inauguration 2009 her production of Tannhäuser was premiered in Gran Canaria. That production was followed by Puccini´s Madama Butterfly (2010) and Eugen d´Albert´s Tiefland (2011) at the Staatstheater Mainz. In 2015 she will lead the new stage direction of Tristan and Isolde in Bayreuth.
Further information can be found at www.bayreutherfestspiele.de/fsdb_en/personen/14625/index.htm.