Matthew Werley

Dr. Matthew Werley is a musicologist and dance scholar in Salzburg, Austria.

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

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Articles on the history of the Salzburg Festival, Gustav Mahler, Stefan Zweig, Richard Wagner, Grete Wiesenthal, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky and several other topics 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 Festival, 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.

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He has taught at universities in the USA, UK and Austria since the late 1990s. Recently as a Senior Lecturer in musicology, he lead two projects in connection with the Salzburg Festival: "Stefan Zweig und die musikalische Welt" (with the Stefan Zweig Centre) and the centenary exhibition and accompanying programme for the International Society for Contemporary Music. The latter project was seen by over 20,000 visitors. 

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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. 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.