Hartmut H. Forche

Hartmut Holm Forche was born in Göttingen, Germany, on 1 July 1945. He took his Abitur at the Tellkampfschule in Hannover and went on to study German literature, art history and philosophy at the universities of Tübingen, Cologne and Hannover, where his teachers included the literary scholars Hans Mayer and Walter Jens and the philosopher Ernst Bloch.

Drawn to the stage, he then trained as an actor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover under Hans-Günther von Klöden, Heinz Walter Krückeberg and Jean Soubeyran.

Forche's first engagement was at the Staatstheater Hannover from 1968 to 1973, where he worked as an actor, assistant director and dramaturg and made his directing debut with David Storey's Home. Between 1969 and 1973 he toured South America, Spain and Portugal with the Goethe-Institut, performing texts by Peter Handke, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Heine and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and running acting workshops. In 1973 he played Lucifer in Carl Orff's De temporum fine comoedia at the Salzburg Festival, directed by August Everding and conducted by Herbert von Karajan.

He went on to serve as senior director and deputy to the artistic director at the theatres of Dortmund, Pforzheim, Bielefeld and Wilhelmshaven, and worked with the playwright Rolf Hochhuth in 1977. From 1979 he was a freelance director, working as a guest in Kassel, Regensburg, Würzburg, Hannover, Leipzig, Zwickau, Neustrelitz, St. Gallen, Wiesbaden, Augsburg, Hildesheim, Coburg, Pforzheim, Kaiserslautern, Lübeck, Dessau and at festivals including Bad Gandersheim. In all he directed more than 200 productions.

Musicals became the centre of his work. He directed the German premieres of Me and My Girl, My One and Only, High Society and Mar i Cel, and staged Les Misérables, Sweeney Todd, Zorba, Victor Victoria and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, as well as an open air Rocky Horror Show on the Schlossplatz in Coburg seen by more than 20,000 people. As a translator from English and Spanish he wrote German versions of Me and My Girl, Singin' in the Rain, High Society, Anything Goes, Funny Girl and Sweeney Todd, and with Jaime Román Briones translated Spanish works including Mar i Cel and the musical Der Medicus. He was the author of the musical Rasputin, with music by Volker Plangg, premiered at the Staatsoperette Dresden, and of Katharina Kepler, about the mother of the astronomer Johannes Kepler.

From 2010 he wrote as a critic and editor for the magazine blickpunkt musical, returning to it in 2024, and from 2012 he taught song interpretation at Osnabrück. He sat on the jury of the 2015 German Musical Theatre Prize, was a member of the German Musical Academy and of the Spanish authors' society SGAE, acted as musical adviser to the Luisenburg Festival in Wunsiedel and in 2019 launched its symposium Perspectives of the Musical.

Forche made Barcelona his adopted home, where he worked on translations with his co-translator Jaime Román Briones. Colleagues at blickpunkt musical remembered his warmth, his fine humour and his long telephone conversations about the theatre. He was survived by his partner, Jaime.

Forche had been in poor health for several months. He died on 27 October 2026, aged 81. The place and cause of death were not made public. His death was announced the same evening by blickpunkt musical, which said its next reviews from him had already been planned and that the final curtain had fallen on a great and much valued colleague.

For several decades Forche was one of the people who brought major English language and Spanish musicals to German audiences, both as a director and through translations that remain in the catalogues of German theatre publishers. blickpunkt musical described him as a language artist and a bridge builder who fought for quality and took the musical deeply seriously as an art form.