The Tramway Conductor of Venice - Biographies

Mario Wiegand, Composer (Germany)

Mario Wiegand was born in 1970 in Chemnitz. His first compositions were written at the age of 12. From 1990 - ­97 he studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Weimar with Wolfgang von Schweinitz and Michael Obst. In 1992, he took a composition class with Alfred Schnittke in Hamburg. In the same year he won a prize at the Forum Junger Deutscher Komponisten. In recent years he has written mainly orchestral and chamber music, as well as vocal works. In 2000, his violin concerto was performed on a tour through Austria, Italy and France. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra premiered his harp concerto in 2002. In the season 2002/03, Mario was composer-in-residence at the Staatskapelle Weimar. For this orchestra, he wrote a cycle for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra after poems by Georg Trakl, Zu Ende glueht ein goldener Tag, and Wenn die Sirenen erwachen, schlaeft die Vernunft ein for large orchestra which deals with the world of the painter Max Ernst. The Trakl cycle will be performed in the autumn of 2004 on the Staatskapelle Weimar's tour of Mexico.

In February 2004, he conducted his most recent orchestral work, Persephone, which was commissioned by the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. This year, Mario will be supported by the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung. In this context, he plans to write a homage to Robert Schumann under the title 'Why?'. Another commission is the result of an international competition related to an exhibition of the Land of Thuringia in 2003. For this occasion, Mario will write a piece for orchestra, O Brave New World with reference to Shakespeare's Tempest.

He has received several scholarships from the Stiftung Kulturfonds and is co-organiser of a highly respected festival for contemporary music, the Weimarer Fruehjahrstage für zeitgenoessische Musik. He is also working with Marec Béla Steffens on another opera project, Tomcat, Tell Me a Fairy-tale! for the Chamber Opera at Rheinsberg Palace near Berlin.

Photo credit: Wolfgang Muller

Marec Béla Steffens, Librettist (Germany)

Marec Béla Steffens, born in 1964, is addicted to writing - but he has had no chance to become a coffeehouse poet, as he lacks two basic qualities required for this vocation: neither does he write poetry, nor does he drink coffee. So he had to go for a more prosaic career. He studied economics. In 1992, after a year of research in Budapest, he received a doctoral degree in his native Hamburg. Since 1991 he has worked for Siemens; after secondments to Shanghai and Budapest he is now based in Warsaw.

Occasionally he publishes articles on management topics and opera reviews, but his main creative work is three books of fairy-tales published in German and illustrated by his wife Krystyna. The heroes of these tales are animals and objects who develop strange wishes and absurd desires: a giraffe is longing to swim; a balcony wants to be a football player; some washing powder dreams of becoming snowflakes; Exeter Cathedral wants to travel abroad in order to visit her relatives. Even the very letters of his books demand that the 'tomcat who tells fairy-tales' devise roles and special adventures for each of them. And the range from A to Z is not even enough - letters from exotic alphabets come for a visit, including a Russian letter who wants to turn into a Chinese character.

Not an easy job for the tomcat who has to accommodate all his fairy-tale characters! His most difficult customer, of course, is the tramway conductor. He will involve an entire opera house in his quest . . .

Marec Béla Steffen's books are Der Kater erzaehlt Maerchen [The Tomcat's Fairy-tales] (Frankfurt on the Main: R.G. Fischer, 2000); Der Strassenbahnschaffner von Venedig [The Tramway Conductor of Venice] (Vechta: Geest-Verlag, 2nd edn, 2003); and Die Welt der Buchstaben [The World of Letters] (Vechta: Geest-Verlag, 2004)

All photos by Julian Brooks unless indicated.