Michael Maul, born in 1978 in Leipzig, is Senior Scholar in the research department of the Leipzig Bach Archive. He was conferred a doctoral degree in 2006 for his award-winning dissertation on Baroque opera in Leipzig from 1693 to 1720, and in 2013, he received his postdoctoral qualification (habilitation) for his monograph on the history of Leipzig’s St Thomas School; the work was awarded the international humanities prize of the German Federal Foreign Office and the German Publishers & Booksellers Association. Since 2015, Michael Maul has been head of programming and, since May 2018, intendant of the Leipzig Bachfest. In his work, he is committed to making current research in musicology accessible to a broad audience through discussion events and radio programmes.

Born in Zurich in 1961, Stefan Haupt has worked as a film director since 1989. In his earlier career, he was active as a musician and directed the Zurich choir “Chor Lunis” for five years. His feature film debut, “Utopia Blues”, won the 2001 Swiss Film Prize, and his 2003 film “Elisabeth Kübler-Ross” is widely considered one of the most successful Swiss documentaries. Other notable achievements include “Der Kreis” (The circle, 2014), which received multiple awards at the Berlinale and was awarded the 2015 Swiss Film Prize for “best screenplay” and for “best film”. His period film “Zwingli” was the most successful Swiss film of 2019 at box offices in Switzerland. In November 2020, his new film “Zürcher Tagebuch” (Zurich diary) will open in Swiss cinemas. He is currently working on a project entitled “B A C H – Dass meine Augen sehen Dich” (B A C H – That my eyes may see you), a film exploring the last eighteen months in the life of J. S. Bach.