But let’s start formally: Heiner Goebbels, born on 17 August 1952 in Neustadt an der Weinstraße in Rhineland-Palatinate, works as a composer, musician, radio playwright, theatre-maker – and creates sound and video installations. His works are characterised by an immense curiosity for breaks in perception and new things, they are provocative in their stirring nature without intending to be, dramatic, even captivating, rich in references from the various artistic disciplines, definitely confronting and challenging, but at the same time highly emotional and marked by an unpretentious love of people and life.  

Thanks to his extensive catalogue of works, Heiner Goebbels is considered one of the most important representatives of the contemporary music and theatre scene. He was artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale from 2012 to 2104.

“The Grand Piano does what it wants”

As much as Heiner Goebbels seeks the unforeseen in his work, he still appreciates a schedule. And so, on this day in April 2024, we are standing before our public discussion concert in the garden of the Villa am Greisbachsee, artist residence of the Monheim Triennale, to discuss a rough dramaturgy for the coming hour. Spring has been pleasantly present for a few days now, so much so that you’re almost tempted to take to the lake for a swim.

In late fall 2023, we met for the first time at Café Zum Goldenen Hans in Monheim am Rhein, at that time without an audience (for a film contribution to the Monheim Triennale), to talk about fundamental content and aesthetic categories in his work. Today we will focus primarily on his musical education and biography, interspersed with short piano pieces.

“I grew up in a very musical home. We listened to a lot of classical music here,” Heiner Goebbels begins our journey back in time to the 1960s. “My mother sang. My father played the piano very well ‘at sight’. I took over the latter from him because I don’t like practicing.”

The piano was Heiner Goebbels’ first instrument, but growing up as the youngest of three brothers, he soon had to learn the cello – his eldest brother played the violin, the second the piano – to complete the family’s piano trio. He received his classical piano lessons from a teacher he remembers as very “generous”, who, while the five-year-old cheated his way through the first pieces, “always lay on the sofa in the next room” and shouted “F sharp! F sharp!”

When studying music, he says, he benefited from the fact that there was a social, political zeitgeist at the time that allowed for a completely different kind of music academy than we know today,” Goebbels explains. “With Klaus Billing, for example, I had a piano professor who very quickly realised that practicing was not my strong point. He then assigned the pieces that needed to be practiced to the Japanese students. Instead, he showed me how to prepare the piano – which is unfortunately no longer a matter of course these days. Together we performed programmes with pieces by John Cage, Earle Brown and Hans Werner Henze. And he had a “license” for his Steinway, i.e. a letter that defined what you were allowed to do on the grand piano without damaging it – and he brought the letter with him to every concert in the concert halls.”

At this point, Heiner Goebbels interrupts his remarks and comments sympathetically that he hadn’t become a particularly great pianist anyway – which is why he was so “shocked” by the request for the talk and concert. A flirtatious, slightly coy statement, because those present in the villa that day will agree: Goebbels is an enigmatic pianist who immediately succeeds in captivating listeners with his playing.

At this moment, I have to think back to our first conversation six months ago, when Heiner Goebbels talked about his many years of experience as Professor of Applied Theatre Studies at Justus Liebig University in Giessen. “When I started teaching, I was afraid that the students would realise that I had no idea about traditional theatre terms. I wouldn’t have been able to give a lecture on Macbeth, for example. What I do know about are materials that we then worked with.”

He has therefore always considered it a “huge privilege” that he was able to pursue “an artistic career without a plan”. “I didn’t apply for all the different positions, they were given to me. So I first became a composer and theatre-maker, later a professor and artistic director. I couldn’t have thought that up and I didn’t intend to.”

For him, the most important lesson from performative studies is “to distrust your own ideas, to always take a close look and perhaps discover something that you hadn’t even thought of before”. And as this is not enough honest self-analysis for him, he adds: “I have no ideas… I usually have an initial moment, a text, for example, that fascinates me in some way, perhaps because I don’t understand it. And then I come up with something completely different in the work, in exchange and collaboration with the performers, or colleagues, or with the help of the space, or the material itself.”

Accordingly, the curriculum did not teach them how to stage theatre or opera, but rather how to research together “what a theatre could look like that we have not yet seen ourselves.”

It is apparent digressions and detailed memories like these, that make Heiner Goebbels such a vivid narrator. And so we jump back to the 1960s and the Goebbels family home. As there were no tape recorders or cassette recorders there, the piano became what Heiner Goebbels calls a “recording medium”. Whatever he heard on the radio, for example a new piece by the Beatles, he immediately tried to play it himself on the piano. That’s right: Beatles! Because on Wednesday evenings, the Goebbels household had a one-hour break from classical music, which the children eagerly filled with pop programmes by Manfred Sexauer on Radio Luxembourg or Hans Werres on Hessischer Rundfunk.

But it was not a forced love of classical music, the enthusiasm was genuine and strong from the very beginning. Heiner Goebbels remembers many concerts in the Festhalle in Landau, where he was able to hear great soloists and works in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as the violinist David Oistrakh, the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich or even the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra with the conductor Herbert von Karajan. “I stood up there in the standing area for two Deutschmarks, felt free and could always see exactly what was going on,” he recalls. “Why does Rostropovich come on stage so late and keep everyone waiting? What does it mean when the famous pianist Elly Ney has the audience sing “Guten Abend, gute Nacht” as an encore? I have always been at least as interested in the extra-musical aspects as the musical precision. It was never just about the music for me, along the lines of: “Now I’ll close my eyes and let it sink in”.

It is palpable in the villa on Greisbachsee how vividly Heiner Goebbels remembers these events. Fittingly, he decides to play Bach’s “Italian Concerto”, as he did 60 years ago in his only solo piano concerto to date – but now only the slow movement, “I can’t manage the rest like that today.”

So for a minute, he plays the ostinato with his left hand, a constantly repeating, ascending and descending musical figure, while the melody for the right hand sounds as if it has been improvised. “The piano does what it wants,” he finally comments with a laugh when something goes wrong, almost as if he really thinks we listeners might not think his playing is good.

Goebbels says that Bach’s piece, like many materials that are biographically significant to him, later also played a role in one of his installations. We are talking about “Stifters Dinge” (“Stifter’s Things”), one of Heiner Goebbels’ most successful performative installations with more than 300 performances worldwide to date, for which he interwove compositions for five automatic pianos, water, stones, wood, sheet metal, fog, rain, ice, a text by Adalbert Stifter and voices by Bill Paterson, Claude Levi-Strauss, William S. Burroughs and Malcolm X, as well as recordings from Papua New Guinea, Latin America and Greece. “There are no people on stage in “Stifter’s Things”; the pianos make all kinds of noises, the strings are plucked and struck – and then you automatically hear this movement played by the pianos.”

As a writer, one always hopes that the different strands in artists’ work and the statements they make might fit together harmoniously. With Heiner Goebbels, you don’t have to worry about this; his socialisation with classical music and his pop enthusiasm fit seamlessly into his own artistic biography, just as the boundaries between disciplines and subject areas are fluid in his case.

Coexistence of societies – improvisation & collaboration

Even though Heiner Goebbels positioned himself against “virtuosity and technique” early on, it was not until after his A-levels that he turned to improvisation. A few formative “jazz experiences”, as he calls them, in the early 1970s were decisive in this matter.

In 1971, Goebbels drove to the Donaueschingen Music Festival in his 2CV and with his driving license, which he had acquired through vacation work, where he heard a concert by Don Cherry that was to have a “life-changing” effect. “Don Cherry was sitting on a carpet at the front of the stage with his wife Moki, their three-year-old son Eagle-Eye Cherry and a dog,” he says, describing the setting at the time very tangibly. “It started with an Indian raga, with Don Cherry having the audience sing along. Behind them in a semi-circle stood the entire phalanx of the most radical European free jazz in a row: Peter Brötzmann, Willem Breuker, Han Bennink, Manfred Schoof, Buschi Niebergall and many others. A gigantic virtuosity of the wildest, free sounds suddenly unfolded there. The tension between the private, familiar intimacy on the front stage and the explosive, destructive ‘public’ behind it made a great impression on me, and the juxtaposition of these social forms also motivated me in a political sense. So it was a very powerful experience. For me, this concert entitled “Humus” actually became a kind of humus, for the development of my musical aesthetics, for example, a little later for the founding of the Left-Wing Radical Brass Orchestra; but also for the staging of my compositions, when the orchestra is set up differently and the musicians are also asked to do something other than just play the notes.”

I have already mentioned that the threads of the works and productions come together perfectly in Heiner Goebbels’ stories. Accordingly, he moves seamlessly from “Humus” to his later collaboration with Don Cherry at the 1987 Frankfurt Artrock Festival, where he performed “Man in the Elevator”. Goebbels remembers the premiere: “With Don Cherry, Fred Frith, Peter Hollinger, George Lewis, Arto Lindsay and Tim Berne, I was able to combine improvised music with my interest in a special form of literature, in this case by Heiner Müller. Incidentally, Peter Hein, singer of the band Fehlfarben, was at the microphone. For the first time, a concert was performative, it went in the direction of what I later called a staged concert’; there were also hints of a stage design, so it was connected to theatre.”

Further information on ”The Man In The Elevator“

Seconds later, we are back in the 2CV with Goebbels on the road to Munich, where he was able to experience John McLaughlin with the Mahavishnu Orchestra as part of the musical programme for the opening of the Olympics. “Meeting of the Spirits” was the next decisive early jazz experience that had a lasting influence on him.

This “meeting of minds” is to be taken literally. For Heiner Goebbels, freedom has collaborative connotations. “My ego is big, but not so big that I think I can do it all myself. If I’m given a task that I have to solve on my own, I’m really bad. That’s why I surround myself with a team of people who can do a lot better than me. Also so that I can be surprised by the result.”

Own realities

Nothing works for Heiner Goebbels without the right place or setting. He always needs a place that speaks to him. He has rarely developed anything on a traditional theatre stage, but mostly in post-industrial spaces that have their own reality. Which is why, in a career that has now spanned five decades, he has always turned down all opera commissions, “and there have been many of them.”

”In an opera house, you have to deliver the finished score two years in advance. But I’m not interested in working like that. I’ve always developed music-theatre over two years with everyone involved. But the institutions are forced to refer to something that is already known beforehand.“

Nevertheless, Heiner Goebbels took over the artistic direction of the Ruhrtriennale between 2012 and 2014. The decisive factor was the complete artistic freedom and economic independence that he was promised, he emphasises. Requirements that he never saw fulfilled in subsequent offers of festival directorships. “There was a supervisory board of politicians at the Ruhr, but they always had my back, even when there were political conflicts, such as with an important project with Gregor Schneider,” Goebbels explains. This allowed him to concentrate on artistic matters. He has always tried to “bring the uncomfortable, the experimental, the unseen or the unheard to the stage.”

Heiner Goebbels continues: “I am not interested in art as representation. Nor is he interested in opera or theatre when characters ‘act as if’. I’m always interested in the search for reality in what you do. Not the illustration. And that also includes an examination of the space.”

He is interested instead in how artistic elements relate to each other.

”Ultimately, I am looking for a musical solution for the relationship between independent media, a polyphony of theatrical means that are not hierarchically ordered: for example, a sound that we cannot explain to ourselves. What effect does a backlight have on us that is stronger than the figure standing in it? Or what does the tone of voice mean for the text, which is spoken in a language that we do not understand? What happens when hearing and seeing don’t go together. There are no coincidences. In general and especially not in artistic work,” says Heiner Goebbels, another of these sentences that resonate.

“Many things seem to come to me by chance and can then be incorporated conclusively into my artistic work. But I only encounter these coincidences because I have now become more open to these surprises and can allow them to happen.” He adds: “I used to put myself under a lot of pressure if I didn’t think of the right thing in time.” But in this rather accidental way, even the kettle at home became the protagonist of “Schwarz auf Weiss”, a piece that was created in 1996 together with the Ensemble Modern and is still being performed. “Just three days before the premiere, I asked the then director of the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt, Tom Stromberg, if we could postpone … He said yes, as he knew we wouldn’t postpone it anyway. But it was very good for me to have the opportunity.“

From The Prequel to the Signature Project

It’s time to talk about Heiner Goebbels’ plans for the Monheim Triennale 2025. But first, a brief look back at The Prequel, the 2024 workshop edition, in which Heiner Goebbels was involved in three impressive duo performances with Brìghde Chaimbeul, Muqata’a and Ganavya Doraiswamy.

Heiner, what is the first memory that comes to your mind when you think of The Prequel?

”I think it’s the presence of the water – that contributes significantly to the relaxation …“

In your analysis, do you actually make a critical distinction between the individual performances at The Prequel, or is it more of an overall impression that the festival left on you?

”The latter. It’s the approachable, never competitive and always interested interaction. As a youngster in the 70s, I had to listen to a lot of cynicism from my older improvising colleagues – I don’t want to mention any names now – like “Well guys, have you practiced well?“

How different or similar did you perceive your playing in the different collaborations?

”Only now have I had a chance to listen to the recordings. What the three or four musical duos have in common is that I always see myself initially as an ‘accompanist’, never as a soloist. That was already the case in the 70s in the duo with Alfred Harth, and in the 80s with the group Cassiber. I see my task as structuring, reacting, supporting, changing, shifting, intensifying; or making compositional suggestions while playing. I work my way from the edges of the sound, so to speak. This works to varying degrees. Perhaps it was particularly balanced in the (short) duo with Peter Evans and in the encounter with Muqata’a. In the other two concerts, with Brìghde and Ganavya, I was more challenged to react to the aesthetics that they developed so virtuosically and that I admire. I found everything exciting and enjoyed these challenges and surprises very, very much.“

You’ve been active as a musician for several decades now and have seen and heard a lot. Are there specific places and events that you would compare to Monheim Triennale?

”Yes, I am thinking, for example, of the International Festival for Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville, Canada, to which I was invited several times in the 1980s, and was able to experience Sun Ra for the first time: “Come to the Planet, I’ll wait for you…!
I’m also thinking of the Sound Symposium in St. Johns in Newfoundland, which still exists, by the way, and which, like Monheim, is built close to the water. Gordon Monahan threw a piano into the sea from a mountain there and, like the compositions for the sirens in Monheim, there was a symphony for the foghorns of all the ships in the bay.
It is always the small places where the musicians can come closer to each other, but also to the audience in a special way. So I wish the Monheim Triennale at least 40 editions.
Improvisation did not play a central role in Goebbels’ musical practice for a long time (from the end of Cassiber in the early 1990s), as he primarily turned his attention to composition commissions and music theatre productions. “The spontaneity that is necessary when improvising is blocked as soon as I start listening to myself as a composer and watching myself as a director …“

This phase lasted until 2018, almost 25 years. But in recent years, Goebbels has noticed a renewed interest in improvisation. The initial moments were try-outs with musicians and dancers for a collaborative project, which led to the founding of an ensemble and resulted in the performance “Everything That Happened and Would Happen”, performed at the Manchester International Festival, the Armory in New York, the Ruhrtriennale and the Salzburg Festival, among others. Coming up this year in Taipei and Paris.

Goebbels realised that he had missed improvisation – although he says that it had actually only shifted from the piano to the composition process (for example improvisation with different orchestral registers and sounds) and in the stage works to improvisation with the most important working tools such as light, space, objects, movement, text. “Even what has to be precisely fixed later in a performance ultimately arises from improvisation, because you can never know in advance what an unconventional collision of the various media will trigger and how it will work.”

Heiner, what can you say about your signature project “The Mayfield” for the Monheim Triennale? And what are the origins of this piece?

”Mayfield is the name of an old train station depot in Manchester where we rehearsed and staged this performance “Everything That’s Happened And Would Happen”. Now a hip hotspot for the city, in 2018 it was still a cold, wet hall with long reverberations that were not only totally filthy with pigeons, all of which had a big influence on the aesthetics of the music that was created there. Apart from the Sicilian saxophonist Gianni Gebbia, whom I have known since the 90s, and Willi Bopp, with whom I have worked as a sound designer since 1989, I first looked for and found the musicians from The Mayfield for this performance: Camille Emaille, a fantastic, incredibly differentiated improvising drummer and percussionist; despite or perhaps because of her classical training, from which she has distanced herself.

Cecile Lartigau plays one of the very first electronic instruments, the Ondes Martenot, for which Olivier Messiaen, for example, composed. She is regarded as one of the few virtuoso soloists for this music in the world’s major concert halls. As an improviser, she brings out sounds from the instrument that have never been heard before.

Nicolas Perrin is not only a guitarist but also an instrument maker and has such a physical grip on the samples and field recordings on the electric guitar he developed that my own sampling in the 80s seems very poor in comparison.

We all work together on “electro-acoustic music”, in which the transformation of sounds and the classical attributions of instruments play a major role. Gianni Gebbia, for example, developed circular breathing – permanent breathing on the saxophone – more than thirty years ago. We are concerned both with the musicalisation of noise and, conversely, with not integrating technological developments into an existing musical concept, but rather accepting them as a challenge for a new common aesthetic: to be surprised.“

You suggested ”Signature / No Signature“ as the title for this post, which can be read in two ways: as a sympathetic emphasis on the collective character of the project, a negation of a singular artist persona. It also works as an artistic rejection of the idea of one, immediately recognisable, signature sound. Do you agree with these interpretations and would you like to add anything else?

”Yes, that’s what I meant. Although it was my initiative to bring these musicians together, the musical result is collective, unpredictable and the relationship between the many voices in it is non-hierarchical. There is no solo here, no accompaniment, miniatures or soundscapes are created that don’t want to illustrate or describe anything, but only refer to themselves and to the listener’s imagination.“

For you, the project is utterly connected to the people involved – meaning that it could only be realised with these musicians, right?

”Yes, it can’t be recreated. Not even by us.“

What can we expect visually for the performance at the Monheim Triennale? Will there be a special stage set?

”No. It’s a concert. The cast has come together for a visually powerful performance with lots of dancers and we still have a few performances until the summer, but I’m the director for these and couldn’t be involved in the music making at all. We’re looking forward to focusing entirely on the music in Monheim. If you still want to see “Everything That Happened And Would Happen”, you should come to the ‘Grand Halle de la Villette’ in Paris at the end of June.“

Even if it sounds trite, it comes from the heart: We can look forward to Heiner Goebbels’ performances at the Monheim Triennale 2025.

The final words, of course, belong to Heiner Goebbels, who at the end of our first conversation returns to the original question about what fascinates him about art:

”I am interested in music or a performance or an image or a text when there is no centre in which meaning is fixed. This is also something I try to realise in my work. Even if my works have a theme, it’s more about changing it and not occupying it, so that a centre for the audience only emerges individually through their own perception and not through a set theme. For me it’s always about diversity of meanings. Both in music and in performative works. There should always be at least as many meanings as there can be spectators, if meaning is not tied to the stage.“