The conductor Joana Mallwitz apologized for arriving late for her interview at the Metropolitan Opera House last week, but she had needed to catch her breath after rehearsal. “Conducting is sweaty business,” she said, as she settled into a straight-backed posture on a sofa in the press lounge, her striking hands with long fingers elegantly crossed at the wrists.
On Monday, Mallwitz, 39 — the music director of the Konzerthaus Berlin and one of the fastest rising classical stars in her native Germany — makes her Met debut with Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” She has been in close relationship with that opera since her first job, at 19, at Theater Heidelberg, a small house where her duties included “everything that one does as Kapellmeister,” she said: rehearsing singers, playing the continuo part on the harpsichord and, when needed, jumping in at short notice to conduct a performance.
“You develop a relationship with such a work,” she said of “Figaro.” “You get to know each other.”
At the end of that afternoon’s rehearsal she had worked with the orchestra on minute details in the overture, finessing dynamic contrasts and highlighting the shock value — “like rock music,” she told the musicians — of the loud outbursts that interrupt the garrulous bubbling fast notes. The key, she said afterward, was to “bring a certain energy into the sound that doesn’t become hard when the playing gets louder.”
Working with the Met musicians, she said, was a joy because after fine-tuning a small section, “they are able to feel what my style is and transfer it” to the rest of the piece. “They’re able to pick it up because mentally, too, they are virtuosos,” she said. “It’s incredible what this orchestra is able to deliver in terms of tempo and transparency and diversity of effects. You want to draw on all of that but also achieve a combination of lightness and drama.”
Lightness and drama, approachability and uncompromising seriousness in her approach to a score — these are at the heart of Mallwitz’s striking rise to prominence in a profession long dominated by men. In 2014, at 28 she became the music director of Theater Erfurt, the youngest conductor to hold such a position in Europe. In 2018, she took over the leadership of the Nuremberg State Theater, an institution that had also served as a springboard for the conductor Christian Thielemann when he was 23. In her second season there she was voted best conductor of the year by a jury of German critics. A celebrated run of Mozart’s “Cosí Fan Tutte” at Salzburg in 2020 catapulted her to international attention.
With the Konzerthaus orchestra, she produced a stormy recording last season of rarely heard early works by Kurt Weill for Deutsche Grammophon. Her Met debut follows by just weeks her debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where she paired works by Tchaikovsky and Schubert with a techno-inspired piece by the Serbian composer Marko Nikodijevic.
Mallwitz’s precocity is all the more notable since she did not come from a musical family. Her talent on the piano at home in Hildesheim was quickly apparent, but for three hours each afternoon she was banned from touching it and sent to play in the garden instead. Still, she rose quickly through the national network of youth music competitions on both piano and violin and entered the Hanover conservatory at 13, in the newly minted Institute for the Early Advancement of the Musically Highly Gifted. Her cohort of four included the pianist Igor Levit.
“Until then, I had practically lived behind the moon,” she said. She knew the chamber pieces she had studied but she had hardly ever attended concerts. At the institute, she recalled, “they just placed the scores in front of us by Schubert, Schumann, Stravinsky, Wagner’s ‘Tristan,’ saying, ‘what do you hear in your head when you read these notes.’ I thought, ‘How is it that I didn’t know there was such fabulous music?’”
She was seized by the desire to dedicate her life to this music, and since the works that so overwhelmed her were largely orchestral, that meant becoming a conductor.
The conductor Martin Brauss, who directs the institute in Hanover, remembers witnessing these epiphanies in the classroom. “When you deal with talent as a professional it is sometimes almost frightening to see what nature can produce,” he said in a phone interview. “Joana was one of these cases. She peers into the notes and, purely through vision, an inner hearing unfolds.”
Because she was hired so young by her first theater in Heidelberg, Mallwitz mostly developed her conducting technique, which combines graceful precision with sweeping gestures that convey gusts of excitement, on the job. “She looks at what the music does to her and sets it in motion,” Brauss said. “She literally embodies it.”
Jens-Daniel Herzog, the intendant of the Nuremberg State Theater, said that audiences responded both to the intensity of her conducting and the easygoing rapport she has built up in her public-facing work. “She has a way of infecting people with her enthusiasm that is completely un-schoolmasterly,” he said. “She took everyone by storm. It was breathtaking.”
In Berlin, Mallwitz was almost immediately forced to add political advocacy to her many roles. Dramatic and sudden cuts in the city’s culture budget announced last year caused painful cancellations. “Sometimes it tears you apart,” she said of the lobbying work she has had to juggle with her conducting and administrative duties. Raising a young child with her husband, the tenor Simon Bode, she often sits up at night studying her scores.
But she said fighting for public arts funding was essential, not to prop up an elitist tradition, but to keep ticket prices at a level at which almost everyone can afford them. “The word ‘subsidies’ is completely misplaced in this context,” she said. “We are not some mismanaged corporation in crisis. If Germany is going to take pride in its culture, keeping concerts affordable should be a basic civic right.”
Budget cuts threaten the outreach programs that are so important to her and that have been such an integral part of her success. In Berlin, her preconcert lectures now routinely draw over 1,000 listeners. To win over new kinds of audiences she offers novel formats such as the Night Sessions, which bring in celebrities from other art forms and explore subjects like rhythm in conversation with a techno artist or timing with a stage actor. “At these sessions I want to learn something,” she said. “I am curious myself.”
After the Night Session devoted to rhythm, she said, “The best thing was finding out afterward that a group of youngsters who were relentlessly Googling something on their phones had been looking up works by Steve Reich because they now wanted to hear more. That’s when I told myself: ‘See? Brilliant. That’s exactly what I was after.’”
