Biography
Reiner Eberhard Moritz was born in Hannover in 1938, where he also studied musicology, German and Romance languages and literature. As a student he also started working as a music journalist and record critic, first for the Hannoversche Presse, then for Die Welt. In 1961 he moved to Munich and got a job with Leo Kirch's company Beta Film, where he was responsible for acquisitions and rights management. Ingmar Bergman's "Through a Glass Darkly", "Winter Light" und "The Silence" were among the films he purchased for the German market.
In 1970, Reiner Moritz wrote his doctoral thesis on German travelogues of the 14th-16th century. In the same year he left Kirch and founded the production company RM Creative. With it he produced numerous music programmes, often recordings of classical concerts, which he sold to television stations all over the world. In 1976 he was nominated for an Emmy Award in the category Outstanding Classical Musical Programs for his ballet recording "Three By Balanchine With The New York City Ballet".
In 1978 Moritz left his company to found RM Arts, also in Munich, in which Leo Kirch held a majority stake. With RM Arts, he produced a large number of stage recordings as well as TV documentaries in the fields of music and visual arts. Moritz's most famous own work is probably the series "1000 Meisterwerke", which he produced and directed for the regional public broadcaster WDR from 1981 to 1994. In each of the ten-minute episodes, one painting was presented and analyzed by art historians. Originally planned for 100 episodes under the title "100 Meisterwerke", the format was expanded to 1000 episodes due to the great success. On average, each episode reached up to five million viewers in Germany and they were also very successful internationally.
Not least because of "1000 Meisterwerke", but also because of the many documentaries about artists such as Otto Dix (1989) and Werner Tübke (1991), Moritz became one of the most internationally renowned producers and rights dealers in the programme sector of art and classical music. In 1982 he was also editor of Knaur's music encyclopaedia. The French Minister of Culture awarded him the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 1989; at the Canadian Banff World Media Festival in 1992 he was awarded an honorary prize in the Global Television section.
As a result of the Kirch bankruptcy in 2002, RM Arts became the owner of the label Arthaus Musik (and was renamed Monarda Arts in 2009). Although Moritz retained business ties to the company, he founded Poorhouse International, a distribution company specializing in cultural documentaries, in 2003. He himself also remained active as a director. In France, he directed theatre recordings of "L'heure espagnole" (2004, TV) and "Gianni Schicchi" (2004, TV). First and foremost, however, he made documentary portraits of artists, for example about the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau (2006), the pianist Hélène Grimaud (2009), the conductor Colin Davis (2012) and the composers Dmitri Shostakovich (2015) and Pierre Boulez (2018).
His documentary film "Anton Bruckner – Das verkannte Genie" ("Anton Bruckner - A Giant in the Making") was released in German cinemas in 2020.