Ulrike Liedtke


Ulrike Liedtke is a German musicologist and politician. From 1991 to 2014 she was founding director of the Musikakademie Rheinsberg. Since 2014 she has been a member of the Landtag of Brandenburg. After her re-election in 2019 she was elected President of the Landtag.

Career

Liedtke was born in Weimar in 1958, the daughter of a conductor and a musicologist. She attended six schools and studied musicology after her Abitur in Stralsund in 1977 at the Karl-Marx-University Leipzig. During her studies in 1980 she became a member of the and the extra choir of the Oper Leipzig. From 1978 to 1985, she worked as a dramaturgical freelancer in the field of booklets and introductions for the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. She also wrote numerous reviews for the Leipzig and Magdeburg regional press. She completed her studies in 1982 with a diploma. In 1985 she was awarded the Promotion A with a thesis Siegfried Matthus – Tendenzen im Schaffen eines Komponisten der DDR.
In 1985 and 1986, Liedtke was music editor for festival and opera broadcasts at the Deutscher Fernsehfunk in Berlin. She was responsible for the concept and editing and presented a series of broadcasts on Neue Musik. In 1986 she moved to the.
After the, she became head of the department for music, theatre, museums and film of the city council. From 1991 to 1993, she worked in the of Brandenburg, responsible for Rheinsberg from September 1991.
From 1991 to 2014 she was founding director of the Musikakademie Rheinsberg. From 1993 she was also managing director and artistic director of the Musikakademie Rheinsberg, also running its Schlosstheater from 2000, with music theatre, ballet and concerts. A focus on works from the 18th century and contemporary music also enabled formats such as performance art. In 2001, the academy was named a "Federal and State Academy". The institution was awarded the critics' prize for music of the Association of German Critics in 2004. In 2006, it received a place of honour at the further education award of the state of Brandenburg.
Liedtke lectured about music theatre, including in 1998/99 at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar, and the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin. In 2017, she was appointed professor of musicology at the University of Potsdam. Her research is focused on music of the 18th century and contemporary music, also opera and opéra comique, Brandenburg regional music history, and critical editing. She wrote contributions to standard works including , The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. She has been a member of the since 1999.
Liedtke is the mother of two children. Her son was a member of the Leipzig Thomanerchor.

Politics

Liedtke was an independent until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In 1989 she was then co-founder of the Social Democratic Party in the GDR in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. Since 1990 she has been a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and was a member of the board in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen,, Rheinsberg. From 2016 to 2019 she was chairman of the SPD of Ostprignitz-Ruppin. She is also the spokeswoman of the cultural forum of the.
From 1990 to 2002 she was a member, and temporarily head, of the, Bezirk Hohenschönhausen and Bezirk Lichtenberg, respectively. In May 2019 she became a city councillor in Rheinsberg. She is the leader of the SPD parliamentary group.
In the 2014 Brandenburg state elections she won a direct mandate in the . She defended her mandate with 23.6 percent of the first votes in the 2019 state elections, and on 25 September 2019 was elected president of the state parliament with 77 of 88 votes at the constituent session.

Memberships

From 1995 to 1997 Liedtke was a member of the National Committee of the UNESCO Cultural Decade. From 1997 until the rotation in 2009 she was a member and chairperson of the of the Ostdeutscher Rundfunk Brandenburg and the Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg. After having been vice-president of the e.V. since 1995, she was elected as its president in 2016. From 2000 to 2002 she was the spokeswoman of the Arbeitskreis der Musikbildungsstätten in Deutschland. In 2000 she became a member of the executive committee, and in 2005 also a member of the supervisory board, of the Deutscher Musikrat. From 2000 to 2005 she was an expert for the Culture 2000 funding programme of the European Commission. From 2000 to 2017 she was an author and chairperson of the advisory board of the CD documentation ' of the DMR. From 2001 to 2017 she was an author and member of the editorial board of the music magazine '. In addition, since 2009 she has been the chairperson of the conference of the state music councils in the Deutscher Musikrat and since 2013 vice president and member of the supervisory board of the DMR. Liedtke was a member of the board of trustees of Musikfonds e.V. from 2016 until 2020, for which she did the conceptual groundwork. The German Council of Cultural Advisors elected Liedtke in 2019 as one of two vice presidents of the Deutscher Kulturrat. She is an individual member of the Brandenburgischer Chorverband, as well as chairwoman of Tanz & Art Rheinsberg and the Ferdinand-Möhring Gesellschaft.

Honours

Liedtke wrote composers' biographies for encyclopedias, including those of Gerd Domhardt, Siegfried Matthus, Günter Neubert and Karl Ottomar Treibmann: