The Götz Friedrich Prize for the 2025/2026 season goes to Giulia Giammona for her production of Paul Hindemith’s Cardillac at the Staatstheater Meiningen and to Elena Maria Artisi for Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Theater Altenburg Gera. Given that both productions were equally compelling, the jury has decided, for the first time this year, to select two winners. The award ceremony will take place on 19 November 2026 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

For over twenty-five years, the Götz Friedrich Prize has been one of the most important institutions for promoting outstanding talent in the field of musical theatre direction – with prize-winners such as Stefan Herheim, Eva-Maria Höckmayr, Elisabeth Stöppler and Benedikt von Peter serving as representative examples. After the Götz-Friedrich Prize was organised for a time by the German-Speaking Opera Conference, it has, since the 22/23 season, returned to the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the main theatre of its namesake. The members of the jury, whose decision was unanimous, are Julia Spinola (Tiroler Landestheater), Dorothea Hartmann (Staatstheater Wiesbaden), Beate Breidenbach (Deutsche Oper Berlin), Wolfgang Nägele (Theater Bielefeld) and Jörg Königsdorf (Deutsche Oper Berlin). The Götz Friedrich Prize is financially supported by the Friends of the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

The German-Italian director Giulia Giammona received her musical training as a young student at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin and studied directing at the Thomas Bernhard Institute at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. Her early directing works include Vanitas by Salvatore Sciarrino and Match by Mauricio Kagel, both staged at the Bavarian State Opera, where she worked as a stage director. Since 2022, she has been working regularly at the Salzburg Festival. There, she initially led the opera camp with a children’s version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and, in subsequent seasons, staged The Child and the Enchanted Objects by Maurice Ravel and The Wise Woman by Carl Orff. In the same year, she directed the world premiere of Georg Friedrich Haas’s opera Sycorax at the Bühnen Bern. In 2024, she received the Jury Prize from the Körber Studio for Young Directors at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg for her production of Penelope, based on Leonora Carrington. She also works as an artistic collaborator on productions by Romeo Castellucci, including Pelléas et Mélisande by Claude Debussy at La Scala and Saint François d’Assise by Olivier Messiaen at the 2026 Salzburg Festival. Her most recent works include Cardillac at the Staatstheater Meiningen, Träume eine Nacht im Elfenwald for the Kinderopernhaus Berlin at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, productions at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden and the Tiroler Festspiele Erl, as well as the world premiere of Anna A. by Silvia Colasanti at the Teatro alla Scala. In the 26/27 season, she will direct productions at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the Haydn Foundation in Bolzano and the Opéra de Lille, amongst others.

In 2017, after two semesters on the early entry programme for singing at the University of the Arts Bremen, Elena Artisi began her studies in musicology at the University of Vienna and Sapienza Università di Roma, graduating in 2023 with a Master of Arts. She has been an alumna of the German National Academic Foundation since 2024. Alongside her studies, Elena Artisi worked as an assistant director for various opera houses, theatres and festivals, including the Theater an der Wien, the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music and the Aalto Theatre in Essen, collaborating with directors such as Ilaria Lanzino, Laurent Pelly and Kay Link. In June, she completed her studies in musical theatre direction at the MDW Vienna in Roland Schwab’s class. As part of this, she realised her own projects as a director, including an adaptation of Thomas Bernhard’s Der Theatermacher, the chamber opera Radames by Peter Eötvös, The Boatswain’s Mate by Ethel Smyth, and, as her final project, Orfeo.Euridice.Schatten – a reinterpretation of the well-known myth with music by Monteverdi and texts by Elfriede Jelinek. In her work, Elena Artisi seeks to push the boundaries of genre and gender stereotypes and to overcome them. During the 25/26 season, she directed Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Theater Altenburg Gera, where she will also stage La traviata in the coming season. In April 2027, she will make her debut at the Theater an der Wien with Gold!, followed by a production of Strauss’s Elektra at Graz Opera.