Michael Gielen

The conductor Michael Gielen was born into a musical family in Dresden, Germany in 1927. His father Joseph was a highly respected theatre director and on his mother's side he was the nephew of Edward Steuermann, the Austrian pianist and composer, and the actress Salka Viertel. Having moved to Buenos Aires as a teenager he escaped the horrors of wartime Dresden and studied music privately with Erwin Leuchter. He began his career as a conductor at the age of 20, serving as a répétiteur of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires between 1947 and 1950. That year he returned to Germany to take up the position of conductor at the Vienna State Opera, a position he held for ten years before accepting jobs at various venues throughout Europe in the 1960s and '70s. These included the Royal Swedish Opera, the Netherlands Opera, the Frankfurt Opera and Belgian National Orchestra. In the 1980s he moved to the United States to perform with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra before returning to Germany in 1986 to perform with the Southwest German Radio Orchestra, an ensemble he has been closely associated with ever since. Gielen retired from conducting in 2014 due to ill health and failing eyesight.

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