Mautner Michael
Michael Mautner is a composer, conductor and author whose work spans opera, concert music, film and interdisciplinary stage projects. His artistic profile is shaped by a long-standing engagement with the relationship between music and visual media, as well as by his activities as a dramaturge, curator and writer. Alongside his international work, he has taught at the Mozarteum University Salzburg since 2015.
The composer, conductor and author Michael Mautner (b. 1959) studied musicology and philosophy at the University of Salzburg, as well as composition at the Mozarteum University with Gerhard Wimberger and conducting with Bernhard Conz, Mladen Bašić and Michael Gielen. Alongside his strong interest in interdisciplinary stage work, he is engaged in exploring the intersections between the perception of visual art and music.
From 1980 to 1984, Michael Mautner was musical director of the Salzburg Elisabethbühne. In the years that followed, he worked as a freelance composer and conductor in Paris and, in 1988, as a répétiteur at the Salzburg Festival and the Salzburg State Theatre. He has appeared as a guest conductor at the Syracuse Opera Company and worked as a music editor at Tele-M TV Vienna, including on the reorganisation of the music archive of Gosteleradiofond in Moscow.
Since 2002, he has been active as a composer, dramaturge and musical director at the Rabenhof Theater in Vienna. Since 2005, he has worked as a scholarly editor for the Hermann Publishing Group, contributing to the editions Critical New Edition of Stage Works and Il Barocco Italiano. He is also active as a music curator at the Vienna Concert Gallery and has been teaching at the Mozarteum University Salzburg in the Pre-College and in Applied Music since 2015.
Michael Mautner has composed works across a wide range of genres, including opera, operetta, symphonic and chamber music, with a particular focus on stage works. He has worked extensively for both stage and film, and conceived and directed the multimedia project COM. His work has been presented at major international festivals and concert series, including Aix-en-Provence, the Salzburg Festival, Steirischer Herbst, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, Wiener Festwochen, Wien Modern and the Bregenz Festival.
He has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival in the youth film/music category for the feature film Tunnelkind (1990) and first prize in the Mozart Composition Competition of the City of Vienna/Austro Mechana (1991). He has conducted numerous premieres of his own works as well as those of other composers. His concert and opera activities have taken him throughout Europe and to the United States.
As an author, Mautner contributes feuilletons to publications such as Die Presse, Falter and Die Furche. He also writes texts for art catalogues and specialist literature for scholarly publications. He was co-author of the stage version of State Operetta – The Austrotragedy, based on Novotny/Zykan.
Michael Mautner lives and works in Vienna and Salzburg.