Heinz Tietjen

Tietjen was born in Tangier, Morocco.^[1] At age twenty-three, he held the producer position at the Opera House in Trier and was appointed its director in 1907, holding dual roles until 1922.^[1] Simultaneously, he was the director at Saarbrücken and Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) from 1919 to 1922.^[1] Tietjen was the director of the Deutsche Oper Berlin between 1925 and 1927, then the Prussian State Theatre director.^[1] Among his productions at this time was the Berlin premiere of Hans Gál's 1923 opera, Die heilige Ente.^[2]

From 1931 to 1944, Tietjen served as artistic director at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus for Winifred Wagner with whom he had a romantic liaison.^[1][3] He was appointed to the Prussian State Council by Prussian Minister President Hermann Göring at the end of 1935, serving until the fall of the Nazi regime.^[4] In his capacity as director of the Prussian State Theatre, Tietjen approved the closure of Berlin's Kroll Opera House, which the Nazis had criticized as a cultural institution of "Reds and Jews". He also dismissed 27 non-Aryan employees and canceled the contracts of many Jewish performers. Despite this, post-war denazification proceedings only issued him a mild reprimand for "behaving opportunistically".^[2]

In 1948 he returned to the directorship of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, serving until 1954, when he was appointed manager and artistic director of the new Hamburg State Opera, a job he held until 1959.^[1]

Heinz Tietjen died in 1967 in Baden-Baden.^[1]