Is Rising Star Director Stefan Herheim MET Opera Bound?

The director in picturesque Salzburg. (Photo: Kerstin Joensson/AP)

"Stefan Herheim started directing operas at age 6, moving puppets around a tiny stage to recordings of his favorite works. No surprise then that the man known today for the intellectual rigor of his productions also infuses them with a sense of childlike wonder. Herheim's father played viola in the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo, and as a youngster he often attended performances and then re-enacted what he had seen. 'It was my need to be God and have my own opera house and conquer this world of my own,' Herheim said in an interview a day before his latest production — Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg — opened at the Salzburg Festival on Friday night. (It plays five more times through Aug. 27.) Conquer this world he has, at the age of 43, and though he doesn't have his own opera house, he works regularly at Europe's best. And now he's coming to the U.S. as well: Peter Gelb, who runs the Metropolitan Opera, was in the audience for the Meistersinger opening and afterward made preliminary arrangements to bring it to the Met in a future season. Herheim got his musical training playing cello, then spent time as a production assistant at the Oslo opera and even ran a touring marionette troupe. In his 20s, he moved to Hamburg, Germany, to study opera production with the legendary Goetz Friedrich." [Source]