About

Clara Ziegelbauer

Clara Ziegelbauer (born November 1993) is an Austrian conductor, musicologist, and composer. She is Artistic Director of the Alma Mahler Philharmonie, founded in 2019, and a postdoctoral university assistant at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw). She conducts a wide repertoire from symphonic to operatic music. Her programs often juxtapose works from different centuries and contrasting musical ideas, connecting them through soundscapes, harmonies, or emotional affinities. She has conducted world premieres of works by composers including Oskar Gigele, Philipp Manuel Gutmann, Judit Varga, Eric Ziegelbauer, and Helena Cánova Parés. Her work also encompasses concert projects in which she combines conducting with live moderation, as well as a range of educational concerts for young audiences. She has conducted the children’s orchestra of the Jeunesse Österreich in 2025 and 2026 and has been invited to return in 2027.

Since the 2024/25 season, she has been a regular guest conductor at the Wiener Volkstheater, where she further developed her particular interest in contemporary music theatre. In 2025, she assisted Julian Rachlin and made her debut at the Musikverein Graz with the Youth Orchestra Alpe Adria. From 2022 to 2024, she was a Conducting Fellow of the Akademie Musiktheater heute of the Deutsche Bank Stiftung. In Frankfurt am Main, she conducted the Ensemble Modern. In 2023, she participated in the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. The same year, she made her Spanish debut as semi-finalist in the International Conducting Competition Llíria, City of Music, and was subsequently invited to conduct at the Palau de la Música de València in 2025. In the 2019/20 season, she worked as a Conducting Fellow and Assistant Conductor of the Bergische Symphoniker in Wuppertal, Germany.

Born and raised in Vienna, Clara Ziegelbauer began conducting at the age of thirteen. At seventeen, she studied musicology at the University of Vienna, alongside the preparatory program in conducting and composition at the mdw. She studied choral conducting with Karl Kamper at the Mozarteum Salzburg, led a male choir, a mixed choir, and a youth choir, and completed her studies in orchestral conducting with Mark Stringer at the mdw.

She has always had a keen interest in music history and musicology, questioning why we perform certain works and not others, and which conventions shape our cultural life. She studied Composition and Music Theory with Gesine Schröder at the mdw, and completed a PhD in musicology, with a dissertation on Gustav Mahler’s performance indications. During the 2025/26 academic year, she was Guest Professor for Music Theory at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna (MUK). Her latest scholarly article explores songs that tell stories of violence against women, a project that grew out of her work as conductor of a music theatre production in Frankfurt am Main.

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