Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Mr. Pereira.The board of directors at the Teatro alla Scala, the celebrated opera house in Milan, has appointed Alexander Pereira, currently the artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, as the house’s new general manager. He will succeed Stéphane Lissner, who has held the post since 2005, when Mr. Lissner leaves to take over the Paris Opera in 2015.
Mr. Pereira’s appointment was announced on Tuesday by Giuliano Pisapia, the mayor of Milan, who said at a news conference that the new director was one of 25 candidates that the company considered, but that the choice had been unanimous.
Mr. Pereira, who was born in Vienna in 1947, comes to the position after a brief tenure in Salzburg, which he took over last year (his contract runs until 2016), and 21 years - from 1991 to 2012 - as the artistic director of the Zurich Opera. He is considered by many to be an intellectual heavyweight, but he also has his detractors: the German magazine Der Spiegel reported that some critics “accuse him of too much attention to the commercial aspect of the traditional Salzburg Festival, and of having no clear artistic line.â€
In Milan, Mr. Pereira will have the option of appointing an artistic director, a title now held by Mr. Lissner. The conductor Daniel Barenboim is the music director. A crucial part of his job will be to bring in new financial supporters  and balancing the house’s budget. Toward that end, he has agreed to a salary about 25 percent lower than Mr. Lissner’s, which has been reported as around €350,000 (about $458,000).
