Gernot Friedel

Gernot Friedel was born on 26 February 1941 in Klagenfurt, Carinthia, and grew up in Innsbruck in Tyrol. He studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, the leading drama school of the German-speaking theatre. His first steps into the profession were as an assistant director at the Vienna Burgtheater and at the Salzburg Festival.

Friedel's first production as director was Martin Walser's Die Zimmerschlacht in Vienna, with Susi Nicoletti and Curd Jurgens. Early productions included Ferdinand Raimund's Der Alpenkonig und der Menschenfeind in Vienna, Medea in Bremen, Richter in eigener Sache in Berlin and Johann Nestroy's Einen Jux will er sich machen in Zurich.

From 1974 to 1984 he worked as assistant to Ernst Haeusserman, and in 1984 he succeeded him as director of Hofmannsthal's Jedermann at the Salzburg Festival, with Klaus Maria Brandauer in the title role. He renewed the production each season and staged it afresh twice: in 1990 with Helmuth Lohner, whose Jedermann came out of the audience in a modern suit, and in 1995 with Gert Voss, in a return to a historical setting that focused on the timeless dimension of the text. Ulrich Tukur joined the existing staging from 1999 to 2001. In all Friedel was responsible for more than one hundred performances on the Domplatz.

In Vienna he directed Der Bockerer and Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys at the Theater in der Josefstadt, Othello darf nicht platzen at the Kammerspiele and Gottfried von Einem's Dantons Tod at the Volksoper, and he also worked at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. In 2003 he stepped in as director of Lehar's Giuditta at the Morbisch Lake Festival.

As a television director he made documentaries and feature films for ORF, ZDF, WDR, ARD and ARTE. His screen work included Ich bin wie Othello (1982), which shared the Eduard Rhein Foundation's cultural prize in 1984, the Tatort episode Fahrerflucht (1985), Mozart und da Ponte (1989), Das Ende eines langen Winters (1990), two parts of Verkaufte Heimat (1991 and 1994), Hotel Savoy (1995), a 1999 documentary about Herbert von Karajan and television versions of Sonny Boys (1999) and Othello darf nicht platzen (2002).

Friedel kept his private life out of public view. He lived in Vienna in his later years while keeping close ties to Innsbruck, where he had grown up and where he was to be buried. Beyond directing he wrote books: Egon Friedell, Abschiedsspielereien, a novel-biography of the Austrian writer and cultural historian, published by Molden in Vienna in 2003, and Herr Specht oder Die Legende von der Entstehung der Karnischen Alpen, illustrated by Herwig Zens and published by Mandelbaum in 2015.

Gernot Friedel died on Saturday 10 October 2026 in Vienna, surrounded by his family. He was 85. His family announced his death to the Austria Press Agency on Monday 12 October, and it was reported by ORF, the Tiroler Tageszeitung, Kurier and the Salzburger Nachrichten. No cause of death was made public. According to the family, the funeral was to take place in a small private circle in Innsbruck.

For a generation of Salzburg Festival audiences Friedel's productions were Jedermann. He guided the play through the eras of Brandauer, Lohner, Voss and Tukur, and the Salzburger Nachrichten wrote that the list of actors he directed in the role read like a who's who of the German-language stage. The Province of Salzburg honoured him in 2001 for eighteen years of artistic work for the festival. His wider legacy lies in decades of Viennese theatre, opera and operetta productions and in a long list of Austrian and German television films and documentaries.