Nikolaus Habjan

Nikolaus Habjan, born in Graz in 1987, studied music theatre directing at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. At the age of 15 he began working with puppet theatre and later perfected the use of hand-and-rod puppets under the guidance of Neville Tranter, which have since become a defining element of 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 was awarded the Nestroy Prize in 2012.

With his productions combining puppets and live actors, Nikolaus Habjan has appeared at major theatres and opera houses, including the Burgtheater Vienna (among others Jelinek: Schatten – Eurydike sagt; Schwab: Volksvernichtung), the Volkstheater Vienna (Lessing: Nathan der Weise; Wien ohne Wiener – A Georg Kreisler Revue), Schauspielhaus Graz (Camus: The Misunderstanding; Hochgatterer: Böhm, Neville Tranter: The Hills Are Alive), Next Liberty Graz (Goethe: Faust, Part One of the Tragedy), the Munich Residenz Theatre (Marivaux: The Dispute), the Bavarian State Opera (Weber: Oberon), Schauspielhaus Zurich (Ausschließlich Inländer – A Georg Kreisler Revue), and the Lower Austrian State Theatre in St. Pölten (Jelinek: Am Königsweg; Canetti: Auto-da-Fé).

In 2019 he directed Gounod’s Faust at the Kammeroper of the Theater an der Wien, followed in 2020 by Richard Strauss’s Salome at the same venue. Also in 2020, the premiere of Alles nicht wahr! – A Georg Kreisler Evening with Nikolaus Habjan and Franui took place at the Haus für Mozart in Salzburg.

For the MusikTheater an der Wien, he directed Oliver Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are and Offenbach’s La Périchole in 2023, for which he received the Austrian Music Theatre Award for Best Overall Operetta Production. In the same year, he developed Die schöne Müllerin – a music theatre evening after Franz Schubert with the band Franui at the Berlin State Opera. Over several seasons, Nikolaus Habjan served as resident director at Opera Dortmund, where he staged, among others, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, The Abduction from the Seraglio, Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, and Puccini’s Tosca. In 2024, he revisited The Magic Flute in Cleveland in collaboration with Franz Welser-Möst. Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, directed by Habjan, was seen in 2023 at the Semperoper Dresden and in 2025 at the Salzburg Mozart Week. Most recently, he directed Schicklgruber by Neville Tranter and Jan Veldman at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, as well as Johann Strauss’s Wiener Blut at the Schönbrunn Palace Theatre.

In parallel, Nikolaus Habjan has established himself as an artistic whistler, a musical genre that was extremely popular in 19th-century Austria. He performs nationally and internationally with various musicians, including the band Franui (Die sieben Leben des Maximilian, Ach bin ich nirgend, ach! zu Haus, Alles nicht wahr, Die schöne Müllerin), the Philharmonia Schrammeln (Ich pfeif’ auf den Tod), and the pianist and organist Ines Schüttengruber (Ich pfeife auf die Oper, Air, Luftkunst, Zauber des Pfeifens), appearing as a puppeteer, actor, artistic whistler, and singer.

Since 2019, Nikolaus Habjan has been teaching puppetry at the Institute of Acting at the University of the Arts Graz.