Gert Westphal (1920-2002)

Actor and stage director Gert Westphal was born in Dresden and is regarded as Germany's most important contemporary reciter. Working for the Deutsche Grammophon and other labels, he recorded more than 100 titles, amongst which are the unabridged versions of the great novels by Goethe, Theodor Fontane, Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde, and Gustave Flaubert.

For twenty years, he was a member of the then highly renowned Zurich Schauspielhaus. It was during this time that he had guest performances at the theatres of Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, and all of Europe's German language radio stations. He directed operas by Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Henze and Reimann in the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf, the State Theatre in Brunswick, in Mannheim, in the Hessian State Theatre in Darmstadt, in Berlin, and in Nuremberg.

Gert Westphal was a member of Hamburg's Free Academy of Arts and received numerous awards, like the Literature Prize of the City of Zurich in 1975, which was the first time that it was awarded to an actor, the Federal Republic of Germany's Cross of Merit, 1st class, in 1982, and, in 1988, the German Record Prize, which was then for the first time awarded for a non-musical production. In 1995, the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft awarded him with the Golden Grammophone, praising him as a "great shaper of great literature". In 2001, he was allowed to sign his name into the Golden Book of the Hanseatic City of Bremen, and the Senate of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg awarded him with the Senator-Biermann-Ratjen Medal in recognition of his cultural merits.