The Mortier Award and the Mortier Next Generation Award were established to draw inspiration for our time from the legacy of Gerard Mortier, the impresario and visionary of the performing arts, who died in 2014. The awards honor personalities who, like Mortier, pursue new ways of artistic expression.
For more than three decades, Gerard Mortier headed renowned opera houses (La Monnaie, Brussels; Opéra national de Paris; Teatro Real, Madrid) and festivals (Salzburg Festival; Ruhrtriennale). Born on 25 November 1943 in Ghent, Mortier throughout his career pursued the art form of opera not only at the heart of artistic debates, but also at the center of socio-political discourse. His programming choices were nourished by the conviction that opera as an art form should address socially relevant questions – and he invariably located his music theater projects within their social and topographical surroundings: whether in Brussels, in Salzburg, at the Ruhrtriennale, in Paris, or finally in Madrid.
“Making theater means breaking daily routines, questioning the acceptance of economic, political, and military violence as the normal state of affairs, awakening communities to questions of human existence that cannot be regulated via laws, and affirming that the world can be better than it is. Creating theater, then, is a mission, almost a sacred office, without being a religion based on revelation. Theater is a human religion,” he noted in his programmatic book Dramaturgie d'une passion (Dramaturgy of a Passion).
Since 2017, the non-profit association Mortier Awards is responsible for presenting the awards and related activities. The initiators of the Mortier Award were Heinz Weyringer, formerly artistic director of the international Ring Award competition (Graz), and Albrecht Thiemann, formerly managing editor of the international music journal Opernwelt (Berlin).
Next to the unendowed main prize, The Mortier Award, Serge Dorny, Artistic Director of the Bavarian State Opera (Munich), joined the initiators of the Mortier Award to establish the Mortier Next Generation Award, which comes with endowment of 30,000 Euro and is linked to a short-term Fellowship provided by the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
MORTIER NEXT GENERATION Fellows
Krystian Lada (2019/2020)
Ulrike Schwab (2020/2021)
Jeffrey Döring (2023/2024)
Frieda Lange (2025/2026)