Composer, pianist, conductor, performer and writer Moritz Eggert was born in Heidelberg in 1965 and is considered one of the most versatile and adventurous voices of contemporary music. Growing up in Heidelberg, Mannheim and Frankfurt am Main, he played keyboard in various rock and jazz ensembles at school, which he followed with academic studies as a classical pianist and composer. These studies continued in London and Munich, where he resides today with his wife, the writer Andrea Heuser, and his two children Milo and Siri.
From the beginning, Moritz Eggert has been working across all musical genres as a composer. He uses different styles of music and continuously tries to work for a new approach to and interaction with contemporary music. Through often widely discussed projects such as Freax, an opera created together with Christoph Schlingensief in 2007, or Wir akzeptieren die Nutzungsbedingungen, a commissioned work on the occasion of the centenary of the Goethe University Frankfurt 2014, Eggert tries to challenge the common image of contemporary music being a matter for experts only.
Moritz Eggert’s list of works already encompasses more than 240 works, with not only twelve evening-long operas (e. g. Die Schnecke 2007, All diese Tage 2012, Teufels Küche 2014, Traviata remixed 2016), but also several ballets, works for dance and musical theatre and orchestral music. Moritz Eggert also writes chamber and ensemble music (e. g. the lied cycle Neue Dichter Lieben and the piano solo cycle Hämmerklavier) and composes vocal and choral music (with a strong focus on “lied”), church music, experimental and electronic music, instrumental concertos, music for children and young people, music for film and radio, as well as radio plays and open air spectacles.
Additionally, Moritz Eggert is a renowned and experienced pianist and has played countless premieres of his own and other works in Germany and abroad. Over the past few years, he has also been appearing increasingly as a conductor, actor and singer, performing in operas and theatre.
Moritz Eggert is also actively working within cultural policy and is a vocal opponent of cuts in arts funding. This also makes him a passionate defender of the younger generation of composers. Together with Sandeep Bhagwati, he founded — whilst still a student — the aDevantgarde Festival for young composers in Munich, a festival that is still going strong today. Eggert has been a board member of the “German Composer’s Association” for three years and tutors as a professor of composition at the University of Music and Theatre in Munich (since 2010).
Alongside his many articles for national and international print and online media, he also writes regularly (often scathingly ironically and thought-provokingly) for his own “Bad Blog of Musick”, which is considered the most influential blog for contemporary music in Germany.
www.moritzeggert.de
