Student
Michael Kunze was born on November 9, 1943, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. His parents, who hailed from Austrian families, were a journalist and an actress. Michael spent his childhood and primary school years in the Black Forest near Freiburg im Breisgau. Later on, his family relocated to Stuttgart and then to Munich, where he attended grammar school.
At a tender age of eight, Michael started writing a newspaper that was mimeographed on carbon paper, a practice he imitated from his father who worked as a reporter. He later developed it into a monthly youth magazine that sometimes circulated up to 100 copies. Already at that age Michael was a keen playwright, and staged his own plays at school performances. In 1956, at thirteen, he developed a passion for rock 'n' roll music, listening to stars like Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and Little Richard on the American forces station AFN. He also started playing an old, scratched guitar, which he treasured as his best friend.
Michael's family moved to Munich when he was fifteen, where he focused more on his studies, mainly Latin, history, and German literature. Despite this, Michael founded a singing group with his classmates and wrote songs for the group, with Bob Dylan being his new idol. He invested in demo recordings of his songs using earnings from holiday jobs and sent them to music publishers.
In his last year at grammar school, Michael met Roswitha on a bus to school, and fell in love. They later got married and became lifelong partners. After completing his studies, Michael received a scholarship from both the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and the Stiftung Maximilianeum as the best student of his year. He studied law, although his heart was in the pop business. Michael had a profound interest in history, politics, sociology, and art. In the faculty's questionnaire he expressed his desire to be a writer.
Michael attended the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich from 1964 to 1968, where he was fascinated by the legal history and philosophy rather than the current laws. He joined Sten Gagnér's seminar in his third semester. The Swedish legal historian, a polymath and philanthropist, became his second mentor and his doctoral supervisor, introducing him to Wittgenstein and teaching him to see intellectual developments in the context of time and society.
After passing his state law exams, Michael Kunze studied philosophy and history for three more years, among others with Dieter Henrich and Thomas Nipperdey.
Songwriter
Michael's career in the music industry began while he was still a student. After sending out demo recordings during his school days, he received an exclusive contract as a songwriter from a music publisher. With his studies and commissioned lyrics, he gained valuable experience in the music business and made his first contacts with record companies. However, he soon discovered that a freelance writer without a reputation would not receive any commissions, so he decided to produce his own songs.
Michael and his wife discovered a talented 16-year-old guitarist with an interesting voice named Peter Maffay in a Munich folk pub. Together, they produced a demo and a single, which became a million-seller and launched Maffay's career as a star. From then on, Michael became a sought-after author and producer, working with many well-known German and foreign performers. He contributed to the success of many top hits for Udo Jürgens, Peter Alexander, Jürgen Drews, and others.
One of Michael's most significant discoveries was studio pianist Sylvester Levay, who became his arranger and favorite composer. Michael noticed that bass riffs encouraged dancing and asked Levay to create something similar, leading to the creation of the disco group Silver Convention's hit song "Fly, Robin, Fly," which became a world hit and the first disco song produced in Munich to conquer the number one spot on the U.S. charts.
After this success, Michael found that his studio work had become a permanent existence, leaving him little time to relax and work on new songs. At the end of the 1970s, he canceled all contracts and quit as a producer, instead focusing on writing song lyrics and developing artistic concepts for various performers. During this period, he worked closely with international artists such as Gilbert Bécaud, Charles Aznavour, Mort Shuman, Nana Mouskouri, and Milva.
Story Architect
In his songs, Michael Kunze often weaved stories. Although he lost interest in the music industry, he continued to pursue his passion for storytelling through writing his first book and creating popular television programs that reached millions. Kunze's interest in musical theater was sparked by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Europe's most successful musical composer at the time.
As the most renowned German songwriter, Kunze caught the attention of Webber, who asked him to translate the musical Evita (libretto by Tim Rice) for its premiere in Vienna. The production was directed by Harold Prince, the legendary director from New York. Prince liked Kunze's way of blending thoughts and music and became a mentor to him. He encouraged Kunze to adapt the world's most successful musicals for the German-speaking theater to study the dramaturgical experience of established authors.
Eventually, Prince urged Kunze to create something original and European. In the mid-1980s, Kunze began working on an original musical in close collaboration with his mentor. Kunze lived in New York for eight years to be near Hal Prince and was also taught by other sponsors and teachers like Stephen Sondheim, Seth Gelblum, and Robert McKee, who initiated him into the secrets of contemporary music dramaturgy.
In September 1992, Michael Kunze's first original musical, Elisabeth (music by Sylvester Levay), premiered in Vienna to critical and commercial acclaim. The show was an instant hit, running for six years and becoming a global sensation, with daily performances around the world for over 30 years.
Kunze has since created a successful musical every five to seven years, including Dance Of The Vampires (music by Jim Steinman), Mozart! (music by Sylvester Levay), Marie Antoinette (music by Sylvester Levay), Rebecca (music by Sylvester Levay), Lady Bess (music by Sylvester Levay), and Beethoven's Secret (music by Ludwig van Beethoven and Sylvester Levay). These productions have been translated into 13 languages and performed in 16 countries.
Book Writer
During his careers as a songwriter and playwright, Michael Kunze has never stopped working as a historian. His specialty is legal history, which he sees as part of cultural history. For his work in this field, the Göttingen Academy of Sciences awarded him the prestigious Brothers Grimm Medal.
In the 1980s, he landed an international bestseller with Strasse ins Feuer / Highroad To The Stake, a popular science adaptation of his dissertation on the Pappenheimer trial. The New York Times praised the work with a two-page review, including the following:
"Highroad to the Stake is Michael Kunze's novelistic presentation of the Pappenheimer case. Mr. Kunze, who is possibly the most popular songwriter in Germany as well as being a translator and screenwriter, based his book on his dissertation in legal history, and the story he tells draws on trial records, diaries and letters, legal and theological treatises, including the notorious ''Hammer of Witches.'' Mr. Kunze carefully distinguishes the records from his own ingenious constructions of what might lie behind them. The result is a vivid story of a witch trial, delivered here in a powerful translation. Witch trials, Mr. Kunze points out, were phenomena not of the ending of the medieval world but of the beginning of the modern one. Prosecutors were arguing against the central intellectual principle of the new age - doubt." (The New York Times Book Review, April 19, 1987, Sunday, Page 14)
In another voluminous book, An Alley To Freedom (Der Freiheit eine Gasse), Michael described the revolution of 1848/49 in southern Germany from the point of view of the revolutionary Gustav Struve. At that time, an attempt was made to establish a German democracy based on the American model. Unjustly, this movement was underestimated after its failure. Michael Kunze felt it was important to describe the actors and their plans. Some found a new existence after the brutal suppression of the revolution in the United States, where many of them fought in the Civil War on the side of the Northern states.
Otherwise, Michael Kunze has been working on scholarly essays and, for over thirty years, on a biography of Rudolf von Jhering, one of the most important German jurists of the 19th century. This book, entitled The Invisible Law, will be published in 2025.
Last Udate 11-03-23