20. November 2022, 14:05
Sylvia Caduff is a pioneer. She was the first general music director in Germany and the first female conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic after 1945. She was the first woman to conduct an orchestra in Germany and thus paved the way for others to succeed her on the podium. What is taken for granted today was still a sensation in the music world back then. This year she celebrates her 85th birthday.
Sylvia Caduff was born in 1937 in Chur, Switzerland. She received piano lessons from an early age. When she was 13, she heard her first orchestral concert at the Lucerne Festival. The program included Anton Bruckner’s “Sixth Symphony,” conducted by Rafael Kubelik. “It turned in me and around me,” remembers Sylvia Caduff. “It really touched me that someone could make something so tangible and tangible out of music.” She took a conducting course with Herbert von Karajan, studied piano and music theory in Lucerne and began a three-year internship with Karajan in Berlin in 1962. In 1966 she won a conducting competition in New York and was thus able to work as an assistant to Leonard Bernstein, conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
From 1967 she was a conductor in Zurich, London and many other cities. From 1972 to 1976 she was a professor at the Bern Conservatory. From 1977 to 1986 Sylvia Caduff was general music director in Solingen, and in 1978 she made her debut with the Berlin Philharmonic. “It was hard work to survive as a conductor alongside prominent men,” says Sylvia Caduff. “The music probably cost me my private life. But I don’t regret it. The music is a wonderful partner.”
Design: Heinz Janisch