Heiner Goebbels
Director
photo Olympia Orlova
Heiner Goebbels (born 1952, Germany) is a composer and director with degrees in sociology and music. His body of work includes music theatre works, staged concerts, radio pieces, as well as ensemble and orchestral works (Surrogate Cities). As a composer, he collaborates with the finest ensembles, orchestras and conductors. Since the early 1990s Heiner Goebbels has composed and directed celebrated music theatre works such as Black on White (1996), Max Black (1998), Eislermaterial (1998), Hashirigaki (2000), Landscape with Distant Relatives (2002), Eraritjaritjaka (2004), Stifters Dinge (2007), Songs of Wars I Have Seen (2007), I Went to the House but Did Not Enter (2008) and When the Mountain Changed Its Clothing (2012), which have been presented at major festivals in Europe, South and North America, Australia and Asia. He has also created installations for the Centre Pompidou (Paris), MAC (Lyon), Mathildenhöhe (Darmstadt) and Documenta (Kassel).
Heiner Goebbels is Professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies of the Justus Liebig University, Giessen, and President of Theatre Academy, Hessen. He is the recipient of many international music, theatre and radio awards and honours, including two Grammy nominations, the International Ibsen Award (2012) and an honorary doctorate from Birmingham City University. From 2012 to 2014, he was artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale International Festival of the Arts, for which he also directed the rarely staged operas Europeras 1 and 2 by John Cage (2012), Delusion of the Fury by Harry Partch (2013) and De Materie by Louis Andriessen (2014).
He has released many CDs on ECM, which earned him two Grammy nominations. His publications include Komposition als Inszenierung (2002) and Aesthetics of Absence (2015). Heiner Goebbels lives in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
