Klaus Zehelein
Opera intendant
Klaus Zehelein (born 5 September 1940) is a German dramaturge. He was president of the Munich Bayerische Theaterakademie August Everding. Zehelein is also president of the association of German theatres, Deutscher Bühnenverein. For fifteen years, from 1991 until 2006, Zehelein was artistic director of the Staatsoper Stuttgart. Critic Gerhard Rohde, summing up Zehelein's theatre work at the Stuttgart opera, says "Zehelein does not view opera as a culinary phenomenon. For him opera is an extremely complex matter, where all arts – as well as social, philosophical, historic, utopic and other aspects – unite. This complexity of opera merits being perceived, being seen, being experienced; thus all works that end up performed on stage, are rigorously analyzed beforehand. He who says this results in thinned-out, merely sophisticated opera performances, missed out substantially in the Zehelein-Era in Stuttgart."
Education and professional activity
Zehelein studied German literature, musicology and philosophy in the Goethe University Frankfurt. Among his teachers were the philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Although not a composer himself, Zehelein participated in the Darmstädter Ferienkurse from 1959 to 1966.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1745891. VIAF identifies the subject as 7619875. The Library of Congress control number is no2002027812. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 1991, 2006 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “Klaus Zehelein” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.