Thomas Schuback

Swedish classical keyboard player, conductor and former professor emeritus at the University College of Opera in Stockholm. He was born on April 16, 1943 in Solna, Stockholm but grew up in the district of Näsbypark in Täby municipality. In the early 1970s, Thomas Schuback stepped forward as an accompanist on a broad front with a rare combination of sensible adherence and personal initiative. An accompanist is exactly half of a romance concert. The other half is the singer. Together, it becomes one hundred percent music. The singers that Thomas Schuback has worked with over the years have been many, such as Claes-Håkan Ahnsjö, Gösta Winbergh, Birgitta Svendén, Elisabeth Söderström, Barbara Bonney, Tatiana Troyanos, Mikael Samuelson and Håkan Hagegård with whom he made a successful round-the-world tour in 1980 that lasted for several months. Thomas began playing the piano at an early age, studied organ and conducting at Kungliga Musikhögskolan I Stockholm, and in 1971 he was recruited by the then opera director Bertil Bokstedt to The Royal Opera House, Stockholm, first as a repetiteur and after a few years as conductor. Over the course of two decades, there were many ballets and operas. At Drottningholms Slottsteater, Thomas Schuback devoted himself mainly to Gustavian opera and conducted (or played) on record, among other things, Johann Christian Friedrich Haeffner's opera "Electra" from 1787. During the 1980s he spent a lot of time in Australia, conducted Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" at the Sydney Opera House and then became musical director of the opera company 'Lyric Opera of Queensland' in Brisbane. He combined the job with conducting at The Royal Opera House, Stockholm, but in 1992 he received a full-time professorship at the University College of Opera (In Swedish: 'Operahögskolan', until 2014 a Swedish institution in Stockholm offering higher education in the field of opera music and related arts. Since 1 January 2014, it has been fully integrated as part of the Stockholm University of the Arts) in musical performance and interpretation. It's not uncommon for people late in life to devote more time to pedagogy. Working with knowledge-hungry young people is among the most fun and grateful there is. As a repetiteur, you previously had to learn the profession all by yourself and found yourself at the bottom of the opera houses' pecking order lists. These were circumstances that Schuback and former opera director Lars af Malmborg thought were very wrong. They therefore started the University College of Opera's two-year repetiteur education and today we can see how graduated study programmers successfully work in the opera departments, both in Sweden and abroad. After leaving the University College of Opera in 2009, Thomas Schuback has also been chairman, between 2010 and 2014, of the Swedish Conductors' Association ("Svenska Dirigentföreningen") with over a hundred members.