Siegfried Mauser On February 21, 2014 Prof. Dr. Siegfried Mauser was elected Chancellor of Salzburg's Mozarteum University by the University Council with a clear majority. He will commence his new position on October 1, 2014 with the formal inauguration following on October 16. The Mozarteum University is one of the highest-ranked institutions for music education in Europe. Mauser will preside over 1,600 students and a teaching body of of 500. As if it had been planned that way (but it hadn't as the project had been in the works for some years), Mauser's recording of the complete Mozart piano sonatas has been issued on October 15, 2014.

Siegfried Mauser, born 1954 in Straubing/Bavaria, studied piano under Rolf Koenen, Rosl Schmid and Alfons Kontarsky at the Munich Music Academy; in addition, he read musicology, philosophy and art history at the universities of Munich and Salzburg where he earned a doctorate for his thesis on Das expressionistische Musiktheater der Wiener Schule (The expressionist musical Theatre of the Second Viennese School). After a lectureship in musicology and piano at the Munich Music Academy, he was appointed professor at the University of Würzburg as early as 1982; this was followed by an appointment as professor at the Mozarteum Salzburg, where he founded the Forschungsinstitut für musikalische Hermeneutik (Research Institute for Musical Hermeneutics). After 15 years he returned to the Munich Academy of Music and Performing Arts, where he had been president since 2003. Furthermore, he is a renowned lecturer of international master classes in piano, interpretation of German Lied and chamber music. Mauser has been decorated with various prizes and awards, such as the Austrian Honorary Cross for Science and Arts (2009), the Federal Republic of Germany Order of Merit (2010) and the Bavarian Maximilian Order (2012). He has been an ordinary member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts since 1990 and in 2002 was appointed Director of its Music section. Mauser's various concerts as soloist and chamber musician have given him to travel around the world. He is a frequent guest at renowned festivals such as the Munich Biennale, the Ruhr piano festival and the Salzburg Festival. He has worked with many renowned conductors, including Péter Eötvös, Friedrich Goldmann, Johannes Kalitzke, Alexander Lazarev, Kent Nagano, Emilio Pomarico, Christoph Poppen, David Robertson, Jonathan Stockhammer, Arturo Tamayo, Mario Venzago, Lothar Zagrosek and Hans Zender.

As soloist, he has played with famous orchestras such as the Symphony Orchestra of the Bavarian Radio, the Bavarian State Orchestra, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin and the Munich Chamber Orchestra. Among his chamber music partners are Ana Chumachenco, Gottfried Schneider, Thomas Zehetmair (violin), Thomas Riebl, Tabea Zimmermann (viola), Heinrich Schiff, Sebastian Hess, Wen-Sinn Yang (violoncello) and Jörg Widmann (clarinet). Mauser played the debut performance of seminal contemporary compositions, such as piano music and concerts of Wolfgang Rihm, Wilhelm Killmayer, Hans Werner Henze and Jörg Widmann as well as Peter Michael Hamel's Piano Quintet (with the Rodin Quartet). The list of his most respected recordings is substantial: not only are the complete piano compositions of Paul Hindemith, Alexander Zemlinsky and Karl Amadeus Hartmann available, but also many recordings of contemporary piano music and chamber music and songs (i.e. with Siegfried Jerusalem and Christoph Prégardien). A recording of the complete piano sonatas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Celestial Harmonies) accompanied by the opus guidebook is being released on october 15, 2014. Siegfried Mauser writes and pioneers various publications on musical analysis, musical æsthetics and the music history of the 19th and 20th centuries, and is editor of the Handbuchs der musikalischen Gattungen (The Musical Genres Handbook), Studien zur musikalischen Hermeneutik (The Study of Musical Hermeneutics) with the Laaber Verlag, and of Beck Wissen Musik (Beck Knowledge: Music) with the publisher C.H. Beck. More recent publications include Beethovens Klaviersonaten (Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, Munich 2001), Lexikon des Klaviers (Piano Encyclopædia) (Kammertöns/Mauser, Laaber 2006). In addition, Eine neue Musikästhetik (New Æsthetics of Music) is a work-in-progress for the Carl Hanser publishing house.