A life traversed in the joy of the theater.
Between directorship and directing, teaching and self-realization, spoken and musical theater, city and foothills of the Alps.
In a linearity that came from a lot of work, a lot of enthusiasm and certainly a little bit of luck.
Born in Vienna, Hellmuth Matiasek studied acting at the Max Reinhardt Seminar and theater studies, German and philosophy at the University of Vienna.
During this time he founded the theater "Kaleidoskop", initially in the basement of the Secession.
Although he himself was denied directing studies, he took the opportunity and introduced this novelty later, from 1972 to 1979, as director of the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich.
A constant in life was Carl Orff.
Ever since they first met between 1962 and 1964 – as director of the Salzburg State Theater he had just become the youngest theater director in the German-speaking world – Matiasek was a great admirer.
Then, during the many years at the Munich Gärtnerplatztheater, from 1983 to 1996 also as director, the composer and teacher played an important role in the repertoire of the "Bavarian Volksoper".
A little later, Matiasek was to be one of his most faithful heirs: as director of the Carl Orff Festival in Andechs from 1997 to 2008.
After the death of August Everding, Hellmuth Matiasek became President of the Bavarian Theater Academy on October 1, 2000 and thus also director of the Munich Prinzregententheater.
He co-founded the academy in 1993 as a special, holistic training facility for all theater-related professions.
He also worked independently as a director, staging in Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna and Basel.
He described his artistic work as a "lifelong work";
The wise, thoughtful practitioner saw the exhausting and tireless self-justification of the houses as an unchangeable hurdle - and took it.
It was also clear to Matiasek that the director as a temporary administrator was a nomad.
The inquisitive person was even able to see a lot of good things in this circumstance, but lived with his wife, the actress Cornelia Froboess, near Rosenheim for around 54 years - in the country and precisely because of this right in the center of his favorite places of work.
When things quieted down about his professional life, a private library with several thousand books awaited him there – they, too, were a life’s work.