Götz Friedrich

Between 1977 and 1981, he was also director of productions at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London, where he staged the first British performances of the three-act completion of Berg's Lulu.

In 1981 he took up the post of general director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin where he stayed until his death in 2000, staging productions across the whole of the operatic repertoire.

He directed the world premières of Luciano Berio's Un re in ascolto, Ingvar Lidholm's "Ett Drömspel"[2] and Henze's Raft of the Medusa.

[3] Among his productions available on DVD are a 1974 film of Salome (with Teresa Stratas) and a 1981 film of Elektra (with Leonie Rysanek and Astrid Varnay), both conducted by Karl Böhm; a 1979 Falstaff (with Gabriel Bacquier) and a 1992 Die Frau ohne Schatten (with Cheryl Studer and Thomas Moser), both conducted by Sir Georg Solti; and a 1982 Bayreuth production of Lohengrin (with Peter Hofmann and Karan Armstrong), conducted by Woldemar Nelsson.

His "controversial" 1972 Bayreuth production of Tannhäuser (with Dame Gwyneth Jones as Elisabeth and Venus) is also available on DVD, as are his Berlin productions of Die tote Stadt (with Armstrong, 1983) and Tristan und Isolde (with René Kollo and Jones, 1993).