Austrian conductor Stefan Soltesz has died after collapsing during a concert in Munich, the German city’s opera house announced on Saturday. It’s with “consternation and deep sadness (that) the Bavarian Opera has to announce the death of Stefan Soltesz“, he wrote in a press release.
Stefan Soltesz passed away on Friday evening”after collapsing while leading The silent woman by Richard Strauss at the National Theater in Munich”, added the Bavarian Opera. No details on the cause of his death were immediately available, reports AFP. The general manager of the Bavarian Opera, Serge Dorny, said in a tweet “deeply saddened“by the death of the conductor who was 73 years old.”We are losing a talented conductor, did he declare. I am losing a good friend. My thoughts are with his wife Michaela.”
The Austrian maestro, of Hungarian descent, held the baton in the opera houses of Vienna, Graz, Hamburg and Berlin during his long career. He was musical director of the Brunswick theater in central Germany from 1988 to 1993 and conductor of the Flemish Opera in Antwerp and Ghent from 1992 to 1997. He made his debut on the stage of the Bavarian Opera in 1995. Stefan Soltesz has played in the greatest theaters on the planet. He left his mark on the Vienna State Opera, the Rome Opera House, the Bolshoi in Moscow, the Grand Théâtre in Geneva and even the Paris Opera.
Stefan Soltesz is unfortunately not the first artist to collapse on the boards. In 2016 the icon of African music, Papa Wemba, succumbed to a malaise while he was on stage in Côte d’Ivoire. Ian Cognito, a 60-year-old British comedian, also died on stage in 2019. And ironically, his audience laughed for long minutes, thinking of yet another joke.