Matthew Werley

Dr. Matthew Werley is a musicologist and cultural historian in Salzburg, Austria.

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Educated at the University of Oxford, his research focuses on opera studies (from Gluck to Puccini, as well as contemporary productions), cultural diplomacy, modern dance, Austrian literature as well as the politics of music in interwar/postwar Austria and Germany.

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Publications on the history of the Salzburg Festival, Gustav Mahler, Stefan Zweig, Richard Wagner, Grete Wiesenthal, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky and several other topics, such as the history of musical form, have appeared in both German and English.

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As a public-facing researcher, he has spoken at the Vienna State Opera, Glyndebourne Opera, the Salzburg Festival, Musiktage Mondsee (Austria) and Academy Travel (Sydney), as well as delivered radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Co, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, ORF Salzburg and ORF Ö1 (the latter reaching a quarter of a million listeners - all live). He has also published in the Salzburger Nachrichten, written programme notes for Bayerische Staatsoper, La Monnaie, Staatstheater Nürnberger and Wiener Philharmoniker, as well as curated ground-breaking local and international exhibitions receiving more than 20,000 visitors.

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Having first gained valuable experience as an orchestral percussionist, which included invitations by such figures as King Hussein of Jordan and Hilary Clinton to travel abroad, Werley has taught extensively at universities in the USA, UK (Cambridge) and Austria since the late 1990s, most recently holding the post of a Senior Lecturer in musicology in Salzburg. ​Since 2017, he has served as both the co-editor of the peer-reviewed Richard Strauss-Jahrbuch (Hollizter Verlag, Vienna) and General Secretary of the Internationale Richard Strauss-Gesellschaft.

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He regularly serves as an international referee for peer-reviewed journals, grant-funding bodies and university-degree assessments. In 2023, the Salzburg Festival appointed him to the Advisory Board of its newly reconstituted Archive.