Herbert Gantschacher


Herbert Gantschacher is an Austrian director and producer and writer.

Education

1976 Gantschacher graduated on the second school in Klagenfurt. From 1977 to 1980, he studied at the Academy for Music and Performing Arts at Graz. He graduated with honors in 1980 and in 1988 he got the M.A. Master of Arts.

Artistic activities

Gantschacher worked for the Schauspielhaus in Graz, the Salzburg State Theatre, the Tyrolian State Theatre Innsbruck, the Danubefestival in Krems, the Chamberopera in Vienna, the Theater an der Winkelwiese in Zürich, the festival "Musica Iudaica" in Prague, the "Kulturbrauerei" in Berlin, the Polish festival "Theatre without Borders" in Szczecin, the National Theatre of Kosovo in Priština, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, the Concordia-University in Montreal, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., dem Museum of The Holocaust in Los Angeles, the festival „musica suprimata“ in Sibiu/Hermannstadt and Cluj-Napoca/ Klausenburg in Romania, the Felicja Blumental International Music Festival at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Singapore Arts Festival.
In Dresden Gantschacher worked for the "Staatsschauspiel", the "kleine Szene" of the Semperoper, the "Dresdner Zentrum für zeitgenössische Musik" and the "Festspielhaus Hellerau".
Also in Stockholm he worked for some institutions as the Kulturhuset and the Royal Swedish Opera.
Gantschacher worked also in cities Erfurt, Odessa, Sankt Petersburg, Helsinki and Bergen, there he worked as a lecturer at the University of Bergen in the section of theatre research and at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory
Now Gantschacher is the artistic director of VISUAL The European and International Visual Theatre Festival with deaf and hearing artists and deaf-blind in Vienna and Austria.
He is also the artistic director of the theatre- and research-project "War is daDa". For that research work he created the two projects entitled "Witness and Victim of the Apocalypse".
A Czech translation of the book has been published at Prague and a Czech version of the exhibition has been presented at the City Archives of Prague in the Clam-Gallas Palace in 2015. A Russian translation of the book has been published at St. Petersburg and a Russian version of the exhibition has been presented at the Russian Museum of the city of Kingisepp and at the House of Composers in St. Perersburg in 2016. A Slovenian translation of the book has been published at Nova Gorica and a Slovenian version of the exhibition has been presented at the museum Grad Kromberk of the Goriški muzej in Nova Gorica in 2018 and 2019.

Other activities

From 1980 to 1981 Gantschacher was a lecturer at the Academy for Music and Performing Arts in Graz and gave also a seminar about the Faust-writings of Goethe, one of his students has been the theatre and opera director Martin Kušej. 1999 Gantschacher was a lecturer at the Institute for Theatre Research of the University Bergen in Norway. In 1999, 2000 and 2016 Gantschacher was a lecturer at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia. In 2018 Gantschacher was the curator of the masterclass project School of Form together with Zvi Semel at the JAMD – Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance about the composer and musician Viktor Ullmann and the one-armed war-disabled pianist Paul Wittgenstein with masterclasses for voice, violin and chamber music and composition in classical and jazz style.
Gantschacher worked on a lot of conferences as lecturer and director in Vienna at the International Conference "The Unifying Aspects of Culture", in Villach "On the Eve of the Apocalypse", in Nötsch "Art and War", in Villach "The Great War – The Forgotten War", "The Great War – The Great Dying", "The Great War – The Last Victory", "The Great War – Long Live the Republic!" and in Nötsch and Arnoldstein "Art.War.Music" about music and The Great War. From 2014 to 2019 he is the curator of the international project "War=daDa" in Nötsch, Arnoldstein, Prague, Kingisepp, Saint Petersburg, Kobarid, Bovec, Lepena, Cividale, Redipuglia, Spilimbergo, Venice.
Due to his research work Gantschacher reconstructed the Digital Wilhelm Jerusalem Archive in the year 2018 eighty years after its destruction by the Nazis as a part of the memorial year Austria 1918–2018 in a digital form for the department of manuscripts at the national archive of the state of Israel in the national library at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Also in 2018 Gantschacher built the Digital Arnold Schönberg Archive in the House, Court and State Archive of the National Archives in Vienna, there he put together for the first time all preserved original documents about the composer Arnold Schönberg and his military service in the First World War from 1914 to 1918 as a digital archive and completed the biography of the composer Schönberg.
For the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation ORF Gantschacher worked as a director for radio drama.
From 1994 to 1999 Gantschacher was a member of the Arts Council of the Government of Carinthia. Since September 2013 he was again a member of the Arts Council of Carinthia till 2018. And from 2013 to 2014 he was the chairman of the Council for Performing Arts of the Government of Carinthia too. 2018 he became the curator of the projects of the State of Carinthia of the memorial year "Austria 1918–2018" and the follow-up projects till 2023.
Since 2015 he works as a columnist for the Kleine Zeitung, one of the most important newspapers of Austria.

Awards

For his theatre works Gantschacher got some important awards:

Publications

Essays about theatre