Johannes Debus was born in Speyer in 1974 and studied piano and conducting at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. His operatic career began in 1998 at the Oper Frankfurt, where he worked first as a répétiteur and later as Kapellmeister. Since 2009 he has been music director of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, where he made his debut with Prokofiev’s “War and Peace”; in 2024 his contract was extended to the 2028/29 season. As a guest he has conducted the Cleveland Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, among others, made his debut at the BBC Proms with the Britten Sinfonia in 2014 and at the Metropolitan Opera with “Salome” in 2016, and works with the Ensemble Modern and the Klangforum Wien. In 2021 he founded the Biglake Festival in Prince Edward County, Ontario. In the 2025/26 season he conducted Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” at the Hamburgische Staatsoper. He takes part as a performer on the Cybele album Sidney Corbett: Que hora es in paradiso? (2006).
Johannes Debus
Conductor
