It is Prague’s good fortune that Jan Burian called Hermann Bäumer when he did.
It was late November 2024, and Burian, head of Prague National Theatre, was in a jam. Andriy Yurkevych, the music director at the State Opera, had to leave the job early for personal reasons, and Burian needed a ready replacement. Per Boye Hansen, the artistic director of the opera department, recommended Bäumer, who was wrapping up a well-regarded 14-year tenure running the Philharmonic Orchestra and State Theatre in Mainz, Germany.
Bäumer was happy to get the call. He had enjoyed guest-conducting a production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the State Opera a year earlier that received rave reviews. But there was a problem. He had already committed to a new job, and was scheduled to sign a contract for it the very next day. Still, he promised Burian he would think about his offer.
“What is there to think about?” his wife asked when he told her about it. “You said you were interested in that theatre, and liked working with the orchestra.” The next day, Bäumer got an even better response from his prospective new employers. “They said, ‘Good for you, it’s not a problem,’” Bäumer recalls. “‘Go do your three years in Prague, then come back to us.”
Fast-forward 10 months, and Bäumer is happily ensconced in the State Opera music director’s office overlooking Wenceslas Square. He could hardly be more enthusiastic when asked how he’s faring. “Super!” he says. “The atmosphere here is super, the singers are super and the musicians are super, they really play from their hearts. And everybody is interested in new ideas.”
Bäumer is a fountain of new ideas. He was known for his creative programming in Mainz, as well as his fearlessness in promoting contemporary music and his extensive work with children, introducing them to classical music and supporting youth orchestras. At the same time, he is a strict traditionalist on the podium – not in the sense of offering standard interpretations, but as the rare conductor willing to put aside his own ego and devote himself entirely to a composer’s wishes.
“Verdi had an idea when he wrote this,” he says, flipping through a fat score for Otello. “And look, what he wants is very clear, it’s all written here. We need to respect that. The job of the conductor is to really read this music and understand the composer’s ideas, not change them. If a conductor has a different idea, then I think he should be a composer.”
Bäumer, 60, got his start in music playing piano and singing in a church choir, mostly at his parents’ urging. His serious interest began on his 12th birthday, when they gave him a trombone. “My father said he never saw me as happy as I was the moment I was given that instrument,” Bäumer says. “No one else was playing trombone, so it was absolutely my own. I could put all my emotion into it.”
After winning several competitions, Bäumer was accepted in a German youth orchestra, then worked his way through stints with the WDR Radio Symphony Orchestra and Bamberg Symphony Orchestra before joining the Berlin Philharmonic in 1992. Though he had formal training in conducting, he learned some of his best lessons in the 11 years he spent with the Berlin orchestra, studying the techniques of stellar conductors like Claudio Abbado, whom he holds in high regard.
Conducting always intrigued him, and Bäumer remembers his first attempt at it vividly. “I was 17, quite young,” he says. “Our choir was run by a cleric, not a professional, who became very frustrated at rehearsal one day. He said, ‘If you don’t like what I’m doing, then maybe one of you would like to do it.’ I looked around, raised my hand and said, ‘I’ll do it.’”
Bäumer’s skills on the podium were good enough to win a position as general music director of the Osnabrück Symphony Orchestra after he left Berlin. He moved on to Mainz starting with the 2011–12 season, and in 2016 was named conductor in residence with the Hof Symphony Orchestra, a position he held for nine seasons. Bäumer also developed a relationship with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, conducting the world premieres of Jón Leifs’ oratorios Edda I and Edda II and recording them with the orchestra.
Bäumer has a flair for unearthing forgotten or overlooked gems. He won an ECHO Klassik Award for his recording of Josef Bohuslav Foerster's Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 with the Osnabrück orchestra. He is also a powerful advocate for modern and contemporary music, leading the German premieres of operas by 20th-century composers such as Kaija Saariaho and Georges Aperghis while he was in Mainz.
His skill with the modern repertoire was clear in his handling of Lady Macbeth, a smart production that worked on every level, but especially in the pit. Bäumer’s command of the many innovative nuances in a difficult score was a riveting complement to torrid staging. He was also asked to guest-conduct a production of Aribert Reimann’s Lear earlier this year at the State Opera, a less successful effort onstage but a marvel musically, with Bäumer eliciting a pinpoint performance of another difficult score from an expanded version of the house orchestra.
For his first season in Prague, Bäumer inherited a long-planned program that has him conducting standard fare like Verdi (Otello, Macbeth and Nabucco) and two of his personal favorites, Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel and Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. He is also leading a concert performance of Bellini’s Norma, where he finds antecedents for some of the ideas that show up later in Verdi. Looking further down the road, Bäumer is planning programs to recognize two of his predecessors at the State Opera, Gustav Mahler and Alexander Zemlinsky. And he has already started work on building children’s programs in Prague, inviting school classes to rehearsals of Hänsel und Gretel.
The through thread in all this – and the main reason Bäumer was hired – is the relationship he struck with the State Opera orchestra. “After Lady Macbeth it was clear that Mr Bäumer had developed a productive rapport with the orchestra,” says Hansen. “He distinguished himself not only as a highly respected musical authority, but also as a conductor who actively builds strong, collaborative relationships with those around him. When Andriy Yurkevych stepped down from his position, Mr Bäumer was my first choice to succeed him.”
If Bäumer’s professional demeanor is anything like his personal style, the appeal is clear. He’s whip-smart with a score, affable and light-hearted, serious about the music but not himself. He knows what he wants from his players, but is realistic about it. “If it’s a new production, I can shape the music,” he says. “But if they’ve already prepared it with a different conductor, I have to respect that. I’ll try to put in my own ideas gradually, and move it a little more my way with each performance.”
As a musician himself, Bäumer also has a keen awareness of what it’s like to be sitting in the orchestra, taking orders from a strong-willed maestro. “One time in Berlin we were doing Schubert’s Fierrabras with Abbado,” he says. “Now Schubert was a great composer, but not in opera. So for three hours we were sitting there thinking, why do we have to play this piece? It’s not really very good.”
He also has a remarkably down-to-earth attitude about working in what he considers the most moving yet most complex art form. “With so many elements in opera, it’s quite difficult to get everything to come together properly,” he says. “If you’re lucky, it works. Sometimes not, you can never be sure. But that’s life.”
Bäumer will no doubt be judged by how well things work at the State Opera over the next few years. He’s already shown his musical prowess, but has larger goals in mind that may not be quite as obvious.
“We tend to focus on the peak in our profession, like the Berlin Philharmonic,” he says. “But what we really need is good people working at the base. Because if we don’t develop an interest in this art form among the younger generation, we’re not going to have it in 50 years. That’s why I’m excited we will have schoolchildren coming to our rehearsals. Hopefully that’s something we can continue to develop. But we’ll see. For that you need people who are enthusiastic, and not just thinking about where they can conduct the next time.”
Bäumer pauses for a moment, then laughs at his own audacity. “This is not completely normal conductor thinking,” he admits. “But that’s my plan.”
Hermann Bäumer conducts a Bellini’s Norma in concert on 18th and 23rd November.
Bäumer conducts Otello later in November, and Nabucco and Hänsel und Gretel from December.
See upcoming performances at Prague State Opera.
This article was sponsored by Prague National Theatre.
