Biography of Johannes Debus

Johannes Debus has recently been appointed Music Director of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. Prior to this appointment, over the course of 10 years, Maestro Debus worked as the répétiteur, assistant conductor and finally resident conductor at Frankfurt Opera. He has also worked extensively as a freelance conductor.

Born in 1974 in Speyer, a city in the southwest of Germany close to the French border, Johannes Debus obtained his musical education at the Hamburg Conservatory, before being engaged by Frankfurt Opera in 1998. There he acquired an extensive repertoire ranging from Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio and works by Rossini, Verdi, Gounod, Massenet and Wagner to Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, Berg’s Lulu and Henze’s Boulevard Solitude. Among the conductors he worked with are Paolo Carignani, Markus Stenz and Sebastian Weigle.

Equally at home in contemporary and standard operatic repertoire, Johannes Debus has conducted a wide range of world premieres and works from the 20th and 21st centuries, including Salvatore Sciarrino’s Macbeth, Jörn Arnecke’s Unter Eis, Mondschatten by Younghi Pagh-Paan and Luciano Berio’s Un re in ascolto. He has also collaborated with internationally acclaimed ensembles such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien and musikFabrik.

In 2007 he made his debut at English National Opera with an acclaimed new production of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha. In 2008 he made his debut at the Bavarian State Opera Munich with Strauss’s Elektra and at the Opéra national de Lyon with Toshio Hosokawa’s Hanjo. In Frankfurt he conducted a new production of Janáček’s The Excursions of Mr. Brouček. The same year he made his debut with the Canadian Opera Company conducting Prokofiev’s War and Peace. In 2009, he returns to Frankfurt Opera for a double bill of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole and de Falla’s La vida breve as well as conducting a new production of Berg’s Wozzeck in Innsbruck.

As a guest conductor he has appeared at major international festivals such as the Venice Biennale, the Schwetzinger Festspiele, the Festival d’Automne Paris, the Lincoln Center Festival, the Ruhrtriennale and the Bergen Festival, and has conducted renowned orchestras including the RSO Stuttgart, the Orchestra della RAI Torino, the Bochumer Symphoniker and the Staatskapelle Halle. He has been engaged as a guest conductor at the Volksoper in Vienna (Hänsel und Gretel), at Cologne Opera (La Traviata, Fidelio, Idomeneo), at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein Düsseldorf (Gounod’s Faust) and at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where he premiered a new production of Mozart-Fragmente (a special tribute for the Mozart 250th anniversary celebrations in 2006) and also conducted performances of Hänsel und Gretel.

In the first year of his tenure as Music Director of the Canadian Opera Company, Maestro Debus conducts a special Diamond Anniversary Concert in November 2009. He also conducts, as part of the COC’s 2009/10 season, its signature production of The Flying Dutchman. Elsewhere, future engagements include a new production of Thomas Adès’ The Tempest at Frankfurt Opera and performances of Strauss’s Salome and Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio at the Bavarian State Opera Munich.