The academic year of 2020/21 marks the birth of the mdw’s Department of Early Music—and in the following conversation, department head Stefan Gottfried and deputy head Eugène Michelangeli speak about their approaches to historically informed performance and the initial projects of this new department.

Olga Neuwirth was born in Graz in 1968. She began taking trumpet lessons at age seven but had to give up playing later on due to an accident. In 1986, she went to San Francisco and enrolled at the Conservatory of Music as well as at the Academy of Art College, where she studied painting and film. She eventually transferred to the mdw.