Director

Lilli Fischer is an Austrian opera director and lives in Vienna. She studied theatre, film and media science as well as musicology at the University of Vienna.

After her first engagements as a stage director’s assistant and stage manager, for example at the Musiktheater Frühling Kilb and the New National Theatre in Tokyo, she was engaged at the Vienna State Opera from 2015 to 2023. There, she worked with directors such as Laurent Pelly, Simon Stone and David McVicar. She also directed numerous revivals, including Otto Schenk’s Der Rosenkavalier and Andreas Homoki’s Lohengrin. In parallel, she realised her own directorial projects with the Mozart Boys’ Choir of Vienna from 2014 to 2016: Brundibár, Bastien and Bastienne, and a Christmas story.

She has been in continuous artistic collaboration with Dmitri Tcherniakov since 2021. This includes his new production of the Ring cycle at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, conducted by Christian Thielemann, with Michael Volle and Andreas Schager in the leading roles. For the revivals of this production, Fischer regularly returns to Berlin. Other joint projects have taken them to Aix-en-Provence (Iphigénie en Aulide et Iphigénie en Tauride), Naples (Rusalka, with Asmik Grigorian in the title role) and the Salzburg Festival (Giulio Cesare in Egitto).

Since 2023, Lilli Fischer has been working as a freelance director. In 2025, she directed Die Fledermaus for the Tokyo Spring Festival at the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, for which she also wrote the dialogue adaptation. In 2026, she made her directorial debut with Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, a production of the Zurich Opera House at the Theater Winterthur. For the production, she developed the prologue Eine Ballnacht, which depicts the Donati family before Buoso’s death during a boisterous celebration.