From Bavaria to the global stage
A portrait of Thomas Guggeis

What does it take to make your conducting debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker? Thomas Guggeis, who has been general music director of the Frankfurt Opera for the last two years, has a fair idea of the requirements: a detailed knowledge of the score, a firm grasp of the tools of the trade, and “respect, not only for the incredible individuals who work in an orchestra like this one, but also for the orchestra’s traditional sound qualities”.

“I think it’s good that we took our time over this concert,” adds Guggeis, who was born in Dachau in Upper Bavaria in 1993. “It means that I’ve had time to gain more experience, to grow and to be as well-prepared for my debut programme as I could possibly be.” Both the orchestra and the hall are already familiar to him: “I spent seven years in Berlin and attended many concerts and rehearsals, learning what makes the players tick and how they react to different conductors.”

So the omens are good, just as Berlin is a good place for Thomas Guggeis; it was here that he made his spectacular breakthrough in 2018, when Christoph von Dohnányi, replacing an ailing Zubin Mehta, cancelled in his turn just before the premiere. Guggeis was working as a répétiteur at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden at the time and learnt of Dohnányi’s departure only hours before the curtain was due to go up on the first night. Still only twenty four years old, he immediately took over from the eighty-eight-year-old maestro. As luck would have it, the Frankfurt Opera’s resourceful intendant Bernd Loebe happened to be in the audience and, recognizing the conductor’s “singular talent”, he signed Guggeis up as his company’s general music director.

Daniel Barenboim as mentor

Although this development reads like a fairytale, it grew from an organic and well-planned sequence of events. Thomas Guggeis started his career as a répétiteur, becoming Daniel Barenboim’s assistant in 2016, and joining the stable of conductors at Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden. He describes Barenboim as his mentor “on multiple levels", showing him  “how one rehearses and how one runs a complex company.” But also, he says, the two spoke at length “about the philosophy of music and about the hierarchy of its various components.” For Barenboim, explains Guggies, "harmony always reigned supreme, followed by melody and rhythm.”

Thomas Guggeis’s interest had been nurtured by his first piano teacher, who had taught him that form and content are more important than technical perfection on the instrument. His love of opera was later fired by one of his university teachers, who was the assistant head of music at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.

Here he studied both music and physics. “Thank goodness, the two faculties lay only 300 metres apart so I was able to cycle quickly from the one to the other.” Today, Thomas Guggeis no longer has to commute between different campuses, and can focus entirely on music, even if he does so with the intellectual rigour of a trained physicist.

Debut with familiar works

Two factors above all have influenced his preparations for his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker: “The best possible knowledge of the works in question, by which I mean knowing exactly what is in the score and the necessary technical know-how as a conductor, which will allow me to narrate these pieces with the orchestra. And then there is my respect not only for the incredible individual artists who work in an orchestra like this one but also for the orchestra’s  traditional sound qualities.”

The first work on his programme is by Richard Strauss, a composer who “alongside Wagner plays a big role in my repertory”. For his debut he has consciously chosen works with which he is already familiar. Indeed, he already tried out this programme with an audience in Bergen at the beginning of this year. On that occasion, too, the soloist in Henri Dutilleux’ Tout un monde lointain… was the violoncellist Maximilian Hornung, who will be making his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker at this same concert. “As the former principal violoncellist with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, he knows exactly how an orchestra reacts,” Guggeis speaks enthusiastically about his soloist. “In a piece as rhythmically complex as this one, this helps us to keep together.”

These are more good signs that this will be an exciting concert. And once the concert is over, the son of a Bavarian brewer will be looking forward to a pint of beer. “This is a kind of little ritual on my part. Sometimes the orchestral attendant will even bring the beer to the stage manager’s desk before I return to the stage to take my bow,” he says with a laugh. Perhaps the orchestral attendants in Berlin will read this.