Nikolaus Habjan
Nikolaus Habjan, born in 1987 in Graz, studied music theatre directing at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. At the age of fifteen, he began working with puppet theatre and refined his use of hand-and-rod puppets under the guidance of Neville Tranter, which he employs in his productions. His first puppet-theatre works were created at the Schubert Theater in Vienna, including Der Herr Karl and F. Zawrel – erbbiologisch und sozial minderwertig, which received the Nestroy Prize in 2012.
With his productions combining puppets and actors, Nikolaus Habjan has appeared as a guest director at the Burgtheater Vienna (including Jelinek’s Schatten – Eurydike sagt and Schwab’s Volksvernichtung), the Volkstheater Vienna (Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and Wien ohne Wiener – A Georg Kreisler Revue), Schauspielhaus Graz (Camus’s The Misunderstanding and Hochgatterer/Tranter’s The Hills Are Alive), Next Liberty Graz (Goethe’s Faust, Part One of the Tragedy), the Residenztheater Munich (Marivaux’s The Dispute), the Bavarian State Opera (Oberon), Schauspielhaus Zurich (Ausschließlich Inländer – A Georg Kreisler Revue), and the Lower Austrian State Theatre in St. Pölten (Jelinek’s Am Königsweg and Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé).
In 2019 he directed Gounod’s Faust for the Kammeroper at Theater an der Wien, followed in 2020 by Richard Strauss’s Salome at the same venue. That same year saw the world premiere of Alles nicht wahr! – A Georg Kreisler Evening with Nikolaus Habjan and Franui at the Haus für Mozart in Salzburg.
For MusikTheater an der Wien, he staged Oliver Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are and Offenbach’s La Périchole in 2023, receiving the Austrian Music Theatre Award for Best Overall Operetta Production. Also in 2023, he developed Die schöne Müllerin – A Music Theatre Evening after Franz Schubert with Musicbanda Franui at the Berlin State Opera.
Over several seasons, Habjan served as resident director at Opera Dortmund, where he staged Mozart’s The Magic Flute, The Abduction from the Seraglio, Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, and Puccini’s Tosca. In 2024, he again collaborated with Franz Welser-Möst on The Magic Flute in Cleveland, USA. Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, directed by Habjan, was seen at the Semperoper Dresden in 2023 and at the Salzburg Mozart Week in 2025. Most recently, he directed Schicklgruber by Neville Tranter and Jan Veldman at the Deutsches Theater Berlin and Johann Strauss’s Wiener Blut at the Schönbrunn Palace Theatre.
In parallel, Nikolaus Habjan established himself as an art whistler, a musical genre that enjoyed great popularity in nineteenth-century Austria. He performs internationally with various musicians, including Musicbanda Franui (The Seven Lives of Maximilian, Ach bin ich nirgend, ach! zu Haus, Alles nicht wahr, Die schöne Müllerin), the Philharmonia Schrammeln (Ich pfeif’ auf den Tod), and pianist and organist Ines Schüttengruber (I Whistle at the Opera, Air, Luftkunst, Magic of Whistling), appearing as a puppeteer, actor, art whistler, and singer.
Since 2019, he has taught puppetry at the Institute of Acting at the University of the Arts Graz.