Michael Engelhardt

The actor and reciter Michael Engelhardt was born in Bonn in 1960. From 1978 to 1981, he attended the Westfälische Schauspielschule in Bochum and subsequently worked as a member of the ensemble and as a guest performer at various theatres, including the Rote Grütze Children’s and Youth Theatre in Berlin, the Kulturfabrik Kampnagel in Hamburg, the Theaterhof Priessenthal, the Schauspiel Bonn, the kleines theater in Bad Godesberg, the neues theater in Halle and the Ro Theater in Rotterdam. Together with the pianist Christoph Tycho Knigge, he performed for twenty years as a reciter of German-language poetry and melodramas. He also collaborated with, amongst others, Corny Littmann, Adrienne Goehler, Martin Lüttge, Valentin Jeker, Guy Cassiers, Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Polina Leschenko. He devoted himself intensively to the work of Friedrich Hölderlin and produced a wide variety of programmes. In the Beethoven–Hölderlin Year 2020, he developed a Metrik-Labor for the newly redesigned museum in the Hölderlin Tower in Tübingen and toured Switzerland and Germany with the Hölderlin performance Sprache! Großes Kino. Since 2021, he has been working increasingly in Switzerland; he performed at the 2021 Lucerne Festival, directed the opening of the 2023 Alpentöne Festival in Altdorf, and in the same year wrote the libretto for Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s melodrama Sedna, which they presented together at the Gstaad Menuhin Festival.

In his recitations, Michael Engelhardt focuses on what he calls ‘responsible speech’: a clearly articulated rendering of poetic language and its lofty tone. Dynamics and tonal shape are intended to provide a decisive answer to the question ‘Why this way and not another?’. For the production of Wolfgang Rihm’s Tutuguri in the summer of 2026 at the Lucerne Festival, the Musikfest Berlin and the musica viva by Bayrischer Rundfunk, Engelhardt has produced a new translation of Antonin Artaud’s texts and, together with the conductor Jörg Widmann, the dramaturg Mark Sattler and the lighting designer Markus Güdel, has created his own stage version.