Opera Scotland

Georg Tintner Suggest updates

Georg Bernhard Tintner.

Born Vienna, 22 May 1917.

Died Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2 October 1999.

Austrian, later Australian, conductor.

Georg Tintner spent most of his career guiding opera companies and orchestras in Australia and New Zealand. Latterly he worked with orchestras in Canada, and formed an attachment in Scotland with the RSNO, making several memorable recordings of Bruckner symphonies with them.

He trained in Vienna under Felix Weingartner, working briefly at the Volksoper in 1938. He was able to emigrate, settling initially in New Zealand. He had a series of appointments leading various Antipodean opera companies. For a decade from 1954 he was based in Sydney as conductor with the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, which eventually became Australian Opera (now Opera Australia). In 1964 he became music director of New Zealand Opera and in 1971 took up the same position with West Australian Opera in Perth for a couple of years before returning to Sydney. In 1977 he moved to Brisbane for a further ten years as conductor of the Queensland Theatre Orchestra.

His only operatic work in Britain took the form of a few months with Sadler's Wells working on the Viennese repertoire.