Nikolaus Bachler, outgoing artistic director of the Bavarian State Opera and future director of the Salzburg Easter Festival knows how to offer artists a platform to talk about their world. Fifteen such conversations with directors he brought to Bavarian State Opera have now been collected in book form. His interlocutors include legends such as Hans Neuenfels and Frank Castorf, visionaries like Rome Castellucci and Krzysztof Warlikowski, lateral entrants like Andreas Dresen, Mateja Koleznik or Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, whose backgrounds lay in drama, film or dance. They talk about the future of opera as an art form, the dialectic between the music's "restrictive" specifications and the freedom of the director, about individual biographies and careers. With an introduction by Albert Ostermaier and illustrations by Georgia Grinter. English edition