Sarah Nemtsov

Sarah Nemtsov is a German composer, born in Oldenburg in 1980 as the daughter of the painter Elisabeth Naomi Reuter. She began composing at the age of eight and took up the oboe at fourteen. She studied composition in Hanover with Nigel Osborne and Johannes Schöllhorn, alongside oboe studies, and then with Walter Zimmermann at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. Since 2007 she has worked solely as a composer. Her catalogue runs to more than 150 pieces in almost every genre, and much of it starts from literature: she has drawn on writers such as Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès, whose Book of Questions is the basis of her opera L’Absence, first staged at the Munich Biennale in 2012. Later operas include Sacrifice, for Halle in 2017, and Ophelia, for Saarbrücken in 2023. Her music has been published by Ricordi since 2016. She is a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and has been professor of composition at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg since 2022.