James Gaffigan’s Tale of Two Cities: HGO’s Next Music Director Discusses a New Bicontinental Chapter in His Career
“The funny thing is, life happens, and you don’t really plan it. Like I never planned to be music director of two opera houses.” And yet it happened to James Gaffigan—twice.
From 2023 to 2025, the conductor headed both the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia and Komische Oper Berlin. He stepped down from the Spanish house last year but was soon named Houston Grand Opera’s next music director, a position he’ll hold alongside his Komische Oper post. Now at the helm of two world-class companies on either side of the Atlantic, Gaffigan suddenly finds himself bicontinental.
“Normally this would be a logistical nightmare,” he admits to me over Zoom from his Berlin apartment. “But everything lined up in a way that worked out.” Gaffigan and HGO General Director and CEO Khori Dastoor planned out his next four seasons in Houston, and Komische Oper scheduled around those dates.
“In my 20s and early 30s, I would be like, ‘Let’s try to do everything’,” says Gaffigan. “But I realize now, with opera, you need to be in one place. So when I’m in Houston, I’m in Houston. I’m not going in and out to the New York Philharmonic or to the Met. Because there’s something to be said about being there—being on the ground. And not just for rehearsals, but for meetings, for planning, for auditions.
“I see so much potential at HGO,” he adds. “I think there’s a big movement that’s about to happen, and I want to be part of that.”
Gaffigan made his HGO debut in 2011 as guest conductor for The Marriage of Figaro. He returned in 2025 to lead the first-ever Concert of Arias that featured the HGO Orchestra, and later that year he conducted the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess. It was on the set of Catfish Row, following a performance, that Dastoor made the official announcement of Gaffigan’s appointment.
But Houston was Gaffigan’s stomping grounds even before his HGO appearances. In 2003, he completed a master’s at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. When he was here for Porgy this past November, Gaffigan had a chance to revisit Montrose, the neighborhood where he lived during grad school. “It was nice walking around because it reminded me of that time—the same smells, the same feeling.”
It would also be fair to call Houston Gaffigan’s old “chomping grounds.” Many of his fondest memories of the city are food-related. “The most nostalgic restaurants for me are the barbecue places,” he says. “The first barbecue I’ve ever had was Goode Company on Kirby. And I still love going, although I love The Pit Room, too. The Pappas Bros. Steakhouse is still amazing. Hugo’s on Westheimer—I remember that opening up.” New discoveries he made during his most recent Houston stay include Anvil Bar, Uchi, JŪN, and BlendIn.
An evident gourmand, Gaffigan seems to experience the cities he works in through a culinary lens. Berlin is no exception: “I’m so busy with my schedule that we rarely have free time to go to concerts. We tend to do the restaurant thing.” He and his wife, Polish violinist Marta Wasilewicz-Gaffigan, are partial to Asian cuisine, as well as the traditional German fare Berlin offers. They even have a regular post-show haunt where there’s always a table reserved under their name, “no matter whether we’re coming or not.”
The couple lives in Charlottenburg, the neighborhood where Komische Oper currently performs. The company has its own house in another part of town, but it’s been under renovation since 2023. In the meantime, they occupy the Schiller Theater. But Komische Oper has also experimented with alternative venues.
For instance, this past fall, Gaffigan conducted Mahler’s Symphony no. 8 in a hangar at Tempelhof Airport. The work is figuratively dubbed the “Symphony of a Thousand” for the massive forces it requires, but this performance literally involved that many musicians—1,030 to be exact.
“Everyone likes getting their hands dirty here, and I really appreciate that,” says Gaffigan of his Komische Oper team. “They’re extremely malleable people, and they really will make anything work the impossible.” He also appreciates the company’s daring repertoire choices. Currently, he’s conducting both of Shostakovich’s operas side-by-side: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and The Nose.
The latter, based on a short story by Gogol, tells the surreal tale of a civil servant whose nose is accidentally shaved off by a barber. The schnoz becomes sentient and gets promoted to a higher bureaucratic rank than its owner. “It’s totally psychotic music,” says Gaffigan.
Both of these operas are staged by Australian director Barrie Kosky, who long served as the company’s intendant—the European term for a general manager. HGO has mounted two Kosky productions: Handel’s Saul in 2019 and a silent-film-inspired version of Mozart’s Magic Flute in 2022, the latter originally created for Komische Oper. Gaffigan calls his colleague “truly extraordinary.”
“It’s always a touchy subject when you ask conductors about directors,” Gaffigan admits, “because often, they can be at odds about a lot of things. But with Barrie—and I say this with such admiration—he comes from the music first and foremost. And he feels this stuff deeply and thinks about it a lot. Also, he has very good taste. I’ve learned a lot from him.”
Gaffigan previously collaborated with Kosky in Berlin on Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (2023 and ’26), Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (2024), and Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel (2024). In his roles as music director of HGO and Komische Oper, he’s hoping to foster crossover between the two companies and hints that more Kosky productions may be making their way to Houston in the future.
When I talk to Gaffigan, HGO has just finished its winter production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. And coincidentally, Komische Oper has just started theirs, with Gaffigan in the pit. The first time he performed the work was last year, when he conducted the children’s matinee—something akin to HGO’s Family Day.
“I think it’s perfect,” he says of Humperdinck’s score. “Hansel and Gretel is, in a way, the foundation of all the German and Austrian music I love—all the Wagner, Strauss, and Berg. When you look around the pit at certain moments, you see every musician smiling. This piece is an important part of the diet of an opera orchestra, so I’m really happy HGO did it, too.
“Sasha Cooke, Mané Galoyan, and Jamie Barton are all friends of mine, and I’ve worked with them all,” he adds. “I was so jealous to see that they were doing the piece without me. I wish I had been part of it!”
Has his time abroad changed the way he approaches deutsche Musik at all? “Conducting great German orchestras, I got a lot of information about German repertoire and the way it’s played in Germany and Austria,” says Gaffigan. “The opera companies in Vienna, Zurich, and Munich were a big part of my life. But working here in Berlin and seeing what comes naturally to these musicians is fascinating to me. I think now it’s my job to bring what I’ve learned here to the United States.”
In the meantime, he’s taking that expertise to Spain. Next month, he’ll conduct a production of Richard Strauss’s Salome at Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, where he was music director for five years. “I remember hearing Salome for the first time as a student and thinking it was from another world,” Gaffigan recalls. “It was alien—from the very first notes, you’re on another planet. Strauss made an entirely new musical language for one opera.
“A lot of conductors hate doing it,” Gaffigan points out. “It’s very stressful.” But he explains his secret to interpreting Strauss’s hyperdense score: “If you try to play every note, you’ll fail. You need to know what to focus on. You need to choose your battles and understand the musical gesture, first and foremost. A lot of these crazy things he writes in Salome are musical gestures—he never really meant people to play every single note. It’s impossible. And even if you play every note right, no one knows or cares. It’s part of the texture.”
Gaffigan has also earned praise for his interpretations of Strauss’s orchestral music. Later this month, he’ll travel to Hamburg to conduct the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in a little-known tone poem by Strauss based on Macbeth. It’s part of a Shakespeare-themed program that sold out well in advance.
While he’s primarily focused on opera at the moment, it’s important to Gaffigan to balance symphonic and operatic repertoire as his career starts this new chapter. At the same time, he doesn’t mind if it’s weighted toward opera for the moment. “I don’t want to be forgotten in one category or another. I just love music. It’s just that my career happens to be opera-heavy now. And I don’t know what it will be 10 years from now. But right now, it’s very opera-heavy—and I love it.”