Thomas Hertel
Biography and cause of death of Thomas Hertel
Thomas Hertel (1951 – 9 December 2024) was a German composer.
Thomas Hertel Life and career
Hertel was born in Bad Salzungen, Thuringia, in 1951. After his Abitur in the special branch for music in Wernigerode, Hertel studied musicology in Halle from 1969 to 1973. Afterwards he was a master student for composition at the Academy of Arts, Berlin with Siegfried Matthus.
Hertel was head of incidental music at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden From 1974 to 1982. He worked as a freelance composer and head of the Young Composers Section in the Dresden Composers’ Association (commissioned operas Leonce and Lena and Till). He received composition prizes in Halle and the Hans Stieber Prize of the Radio of the GDR. After his compositional promotion (among others by the two Leipzig music publishers Peters and Deutscher Verlag für Musik), he was banned from working on and realising cross-genre projects.
Hertel left East Germany in 1985 for artistic and cultural-political reasons; he devoted himself primarily to the realisation of musical-scenic projects; among them Cernunnos for 7 reed players, bulls and live electronics for the 1993 Donaueschinger Musiktage edition with the Experimentalstudio des SWR
the opening installation for the 1996 Lucerne Festival aus der erde durch den wind – a mobile open-air music for various wind, vocal and bell ensembles and the sound transport of natural sound samples, and in 1999 the cartoon opera Das Biest des Monsieur Racine after Tomi Ungerer commissioned by the Theater Basel. In 1991, he received the Art Prize of the City of Munich for experimental theatre.
He held teaching posts at music academies and drama schools among others in Hamburg, Bochum, Frankfurt and Munich. He realised numerous commissioned works, song recitals and theatre music for over 40 German-speaking theatres. He returned to Leipzig and was from 2002 to 2008 head of incidental music at the Schauspiel Leipzig there he created the experimental musical-scenic series mund & knie 1–12, for which he was awarded the Leipzig Theatre Prize in 2009.
Hertel died after a long illness in Leipzig, on 9 December 2024, at the age of 73.
Thomas Hertel Awards
1982: Hans Stieber Prize
1982: Hanns Eisler Prize
1991: Kunstpreis der Landeshauptstadt München
2009: Leipziger Theaterpreis
Source: Wikipedia