Born in Milan Italy in 1958. In 1974 Daniele Abbado was on stage of the Edinburgh Festival where he worked as a stagehand. One year later, he was admitted to the school of the Piccolo Teatro of Milan where he graduated in stage direction in 1977. At the same time studied Theoretical Philosophy at Pavia University where he graduated in 1986.
In 1988 he signs his first stage directions at Stadttheater Luzern and Teatro Regio in Turin. During the same year he begins a fruitful collaboration with Studio Azzurro in Milan from which Aleksandr Nevskij Video is realized, both for the Italian radio TV station RAI3 and for Konzerthaus Wien in its live version. Another important collaboration begins also with Teatro Due of Parma, where Abbado signs on as the playwright for Quando incomincia lo spettacolo and will later on realize the directions of Progetto Ritsos – Agamennone and for Creatura di sabbia, based on the novel by Tahar Ben Jelloun.
The 1990s mark the beginning of the important collaboration with the actor and musician Moni Ovadia for Golem in Bari, Milan, Rome, Berlin (Hebbel Theater), Paris, New York (Café La MaMa), Krakòw (Stary Teatr); with the actress Giovanna Bozzolo for Creatura di sabbia, 4.48 Psycosis, La nuotatrice, and with the actress Lucilla Morlacchi for Majakovkij.
Of most significance is the collaboration with Romaeuropa Festival, which began in 1989 with a new live version of Aleksandr Nevskij Video at Villa Medici, continued with Fiume di musica in 1993, the huge inaugural show on the Tevere river, and with the show installation Frammenti sull’Apocalisse in 1995.
Abbado tackled Mozart’s musical theater starting from 1994, by staging Così fan tutte, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, in various productions.
During this time he launched an intensive collaboration with contemporary composers including Luciano Berio, for Zaide, Passaggio, Laborynthus, Fabio Vacchi for Les oiseaux de passage, and Helmut Oehring for Dokumentation I, winning opera at the Orfeus Competition ’96.
Since 1998 he developed various innovative projects using the stage direction in semi-staged form with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia of Rome including Der Freischütz, Fidelio and Tannhäuser, all under the conducting of Myung Wung Chung; and he presented, in the new Auditorium Parco della Musica of Rome, Wozzeck with Daniele Gatti, and Cosi fan tutte.
During the same time he dedicates particular attention to the staging of works by 20th century composers from Stravinskij to Berg, Ravel, Weill, Debussy, Honegger (Jeanne D’Arc au Bûcher, opening of the season 1993 of the Teatro Massimo di Palermo), Britten (Midsummer night’s dream, first performance in the reconstructed Petruzzelli Theatre of Bari in 2009) and Dallapiccola.
The staging of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, produced in Genoa in 1999, has had an important series of revivals over the years in Florence, Madrid, Reggio Emilia, Parma, Sevilla, Ravenna and again in Florence in 2013.
The staging of Dallapiccola’s Il Prigioniero and Volo di notte produced by the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino received the Abbiati Award as the best performance in Italy in 2004.
In 2002 he was appointed as the Artistic Director of the I Teatri Foundation of Reggio Emilia, a commitment to which he dedicated himself until 2012.
While developing these multiple aspects and repertoires in his work, he faces opera titles from the classical repertoire, while continuing the collaboration with contemporary authors including Hans Werner Henze for Pollicino , Giorgio Battistelli for Experimentum Mundi, (Salzburger Festspiele ’99), Shigeaki Saegusa, Alberto Colla for Il processo (winner of the 2001 Verdi Centenary Competition).
The project Miracolo a Milano was born from the collaboration with Battistelli, which debuted in Reggio Emilia and was represented in Rome in 2008 in the spaces of the new Auditorium.
Abbado returned to the Mozart theatre in 2005 with a new production of Die Zauberflöte in Reggio Emilia, Ferrara, Baden Baden, and at the Edinburgh Festival 2006. And he continued his work with a new production of the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy, the three titles conceived as a single performance divided over three consecutive evenings, which was going on stage in Verona and Reggio Emilia in 2006.
In 2012 he made his debut at the Staatsoper Wien with Don Carlo, starring Ramon Vargas, René Pape, Simon Keenlyside, Krassimira Stojanova. The performance was staged almost annually in the following years.
Still in 2012 he received the International Opera Award for Best Opera Director commonly referred to as the Oscars of Opera.
In 2013 he made his debut at La Scala with Nabucco, starring Leo Nucci. The performance is co-produced by the Royal Opera House in London and the Teatro Liceu in Barcelona.
Significant in 2015 is the production of Pelléas et Mélisande by Claude Debussy in the new spaces of the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence, conducted by Daniele Gatti.
In 2016, he realized a new production of Attila by G.Verdi for the opening of the 2016 season of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna – conductor Michele Mariotti, starring Ildebrando D’Arcangelo – and for the Massimo in Palermo and La Fenice in Venice.
During the same year he returns to the Royal Opera House for Nabucco, and plans for the Bookcity festival in Milan, the huge kermesse Le voci della città – a reading marathon inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
In 2017 he returned to the Wiener Staatsoper with the new production of Il Trovatore and with Don Carlo, to La Scala with Nabucco and to the Teatro Regio di Torino with Falstaff.
His acquaintance with Giuseppe Verdi’s operas led to the proposal by the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani to write an essay on Verdi’s theatre, which was published in the Rivista di Studi Verdiani in 2017.
Between 2018 and 2019, his new productions were Macbeth for the Festival Verdi in Parma, Cagliari and Tbilisi, and Rigoletto with which he inaugurated the season of the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, conducted by Daniele Gatti, starring Roberto Frontali and Lisette Oropesa, as well as the revivals of Butterfly in Bari and Don Carlo and Trovatore at the Wiener Staatsoper.
In 2021 he realized Turandot, with the finale by Luciano Berio, at the Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago, where it was then staged again in ‘22 and ’23, and Infinite Falstaff – A tale in 7 parts between Verdi, Shakespeare, Orson Welles and Frank Zappa, produced by the Lausitz Festival, in addition to the revival of Don Carlo at the Wiener Staatsoper and Nabucco at the Royal Opera House.
In 2023, he returned to dramatic theatre to stage La vita, il sogno – a text by the poet Franco Loi inspired by La vida es sueño by Calderón de la Barca, produced by Teatro Franco Parenti in Milan. He was then invited by Teatro Due in Parma to curate a production of Peer Gynt by Enrik Ibsen, for a cast of fifteen actors and an orchestra. The play debuted on the stage of the Teatro Due’s Shakespeare Arena.
Again at the Franco Parenti Theatre in Milan, he staged a new version of the play Majakovsky, starring Giovanna Bozzolo.
In 2024 he returned to the Teatro alla Scala in Milan to direct Giuseppe Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.
For the Teatro Comunale of Bologna, he realised a particular project composed by Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, completed by Luigi Nono’s I Cori di Didone, combined with Kurt Weill’s Die sieben Todsünden on a text by Bertolt Brecht.
He then realized, for La Fenice in Venice, the diptych composed of Luigi Nono’s La fabbrica illuminata together with Arnold Schönberg’s Erwartung.