In Mozart's Idomeneo at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2006, he was accused of offending Islam, and in Wagner's Lohengrin at the Bayreuth Festival in 2010, he dressed the choir as laboratory rats.

[1] He studied drama and directing at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen from 1961 to 1964,[4] and at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna in the 1960s,[3][5] where he met his future wife, actress Elisabeth Trissenaar.

He worked with well-known actors including Klaus Maria Brandauer and Anne Bennent [de], directing Kleists Penthesilea at the Schillertheater in Berlin, with Trissenaar in the title role, and Shakespeare's Ein Sommernachtstraum with Bernhard Minetti also there.

It showed already his specific view on works of the standard repertoire: "tracing the subliminal of the music and the interlinear of the texts and thus often opening surprisingly new, sometimes even disturbingly ambivalent perspectives" ("... die dem Unterschwelligen der Musik und dem Zwischenzeiligen der Texte nachspürte und so oft überraschend neue, ja zuweilen verstörend ambivalente Perspektiven auf die Werke eröffnete").

When Schreker's Die Gezeichneten was revived at the Oper Frankfurt, conducted by Michael Gielen, he staged it as "drug intoxication, with heroin syringe in the station toilet" ("Drogenrausch mit Heroinspritze auf der Bahnhofstoilette").

[18] In December 2003, his production of Mozart's Idomeneo at the Deutsche Oper Berlin included a scene in which the title character staggers on stage carrying the severed heads of Neptune, Jesus and Buddha.

[6][19] When the production was planned to be repeated in September 2006, then adding the head of Muhammad, the police warned that it might present a security risk, and the opera house cancelled the performances.

[1][10] On 31 January 2016, he directed the world premiere of Miroslav Srnka's South Pole [de] commissioned by the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, conducted by Kirill Petrenko.