Heiner Goebbels

Artist Website

“What drives the attention of an audience is the unforeseeable, and the secrets and mystery of a performance.”

Heiner Goebbels, one of the great innovators in the world of theatre, multimedia and performance art, was born in Germany in 1952. He was a member of the art rock group Cassiber from 1982 to 1992, and at the same time was writing music for theatre, film and the ballet. In the mid-1980s he began creating audio plays for radio – Hörstücke, available as a 3-CD set in ECM’s New Series – often based on texts by the 20th-century German dramatist Heiner Müller, a long-term influence. Müller also supplied the textual inspiration for Goebbels’ Der Mann im Fahrstuhl (The Man in the Elevator).

[...]

“What drives the attention of an audience is the unforeseeable, and the secrets and mystery of a performance.”

Since 1988 Goebbels has composed regularly for the Ensemble Modern (Red Run, Befreiung, La Jalousie) and the Ensemble Intercontemporain (Herakles 2). In 1994 came Surrogate Cities, a response to the complexity of the modern city, scored for large orchestra and one of the composer’s most far-reaching projects. In 2002, Goebbels premiered his first opera Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten which the BBC’s Andrew McGregor called “a stunning achievement, and a haunting experience”. In the same year Eislermaterial, one of Goebbels’ most popular albums, was released. It is a multi-faceted portrait of – and tribute to – one of Goebbels’ heroes, the 20th-century German composer Hanns Eisler, who set many texts by Brecht.

Stifters Dinge (Stifter’s Things), a “performative installation” without performers, musicians or actors was first presented in Lausanne in 2007 and seen in London the following year; a CD of this extraordinary acoustic creation was subsequently released. The Guardian said of it: “ It's a typical Goebbels collage and typically, too, all the elements somehow cohere. Even on disc it's mysterious and compelling.”