Ralph Siegel celebrates his birthday: 80 years and not a bit tired

Restless. An outstanding property of Ralph Siegel (80), in which obviously an innate energy is obvious. Sometimes it is a new stage project, sometimes the current state of family life, sometimes the latest medical intermediate stand. He seems to be afraid of rest or even standstill, even though it is already at an advanced age. On September 30th, Ralph Siegel 80.

It is usually a new song that drives him. He can get into rotation because Ralph Siegel writes new songs like on the assembly line. It was thousands in the course of his professional life. “You can count that relatively precisely, because on the one hand there are the official songs that I have registered and produced: composed and produced over 2000,” he told Bavarian Radio years ago. That is “actually not a large number, because that was a song in these 40 years per week. If you are a composer, you can see it as your profession, and then you also write a song a week.” Since then, new ones have been added, possibly a few hundred, so the seal average may have increased.

Somehow it feels like he’s always there. In fact, Ralph Siegel is not the first seal of his kind. Father and grandfather already lived up the German music industry sustainably, it goes even further.

The composer Bernhard Joseph Klein (1793-1832) is the ancestor. In addition to church music, he also created three operas, was a music director at Cologne Cathedral and at the University of Berlin and published the song book “German songs for young and old” in 1818. His great-grandson Rudolf Siegel (1878-1948) was a doctor of law, but also composed the comedy opera “Mr. Dandolo” and “12 German folk songs for piano for 3 hands”, conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and was general music director in Krefeld.

His son Ralph Maria Siegel (1911-1972) was a real music entrepreneur as a tenor, composer, lyrics, music publisher and writer, to which extremely popular hit like the “Capri-Fischer” (text), “I have a case in Berlin” (music) or “under the red lantern of St. Pauli” (music). But his greatest legacy to the German -speaking hit world became his son Ralph, who was born in Munich in 1945.

Little Ralph learned drums, guitar, accordion and piano in the early childhood and took lessons in harmony and composition apprenticeship. Already at twelve he is said to have written his first music title under the pseudonym Peter Elversen.

As a young man, he then goes to Paris and finally to the USA in Nashville (Tennessee), the center of country music. He gets to know Roy Orbison and writes at 19 to the 50 songs, one of them is “it’s a long, long way to Georgia”, with which country star Don Gibson in 1967 occupied a remarkable twelfth place on the US Country Charts.

After returning, the young seal really attacks. He composes for stars like Peter Alexander, Roy Black, Karel Gott, Mireille Mathieu, Mary Roos, Costa Cordalis, Heino, Michael Holm, Roland Kaiser, Chris Roberts, Marianne Rosenberg, Lena Valaitis, Katja Ebstein. He was involved in songs who are still catchy tunes today, among other things for Udo Jürgen’s “Greek wine”, “The devil made the schnapps”, “An honorable house”, for Rex Gildo “Fiesta Mexicana”, for Chris Robert’s “You can’t always be seventeen”.

As a world success, the Dschinghis Khan group founded by Ralph Siegel, who started in 1979 at the Grand Prix Eurovision de la Chanson, today’s Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), in Israel. His disco song of the same name “Dschinghis Khan” not only becomes a No. 1 hit in German-speaking countries, but also comes to the charts internationally in over 20 countries (including Japan, Australia, Sweden, Soviet Union).

The US singer Mordechai Ben-David has covered the song in Yiddish under the title “Yidden”. In the same year, Siegel composed the hit “Moscow”, which also has international success. And at the competition in Israel, Siegel with Dschinghis Khan took the 4th place.

At the ESC, Siegel writes his own chapter of success. From 1972 to 2016 he was with 45 titles in the German preliminary decisions, sometimes even with several songs per year and among pseudonyms such as Claus-Peter Bard, Werner Zylka or Mario Mathias. At the ESC finals he reached two fourth places, twice the third and three times the second place. And in 1982 he won the ESC in Harrogate (England) with the then unknown, only 17-year-old singer Nicole and his title “A little peace”. The song goes around the world and was published in seven other languages.

His private life is also restless like his career. Ralph Siegel has been an integral part of the Munich Society for decades. His first wife was Dunja, with whom he was married from 1975 to 1989 and has two adult daughters (UA Model and Reality Star Giulia Siegel, 50). Wife No. 2 became Dagmar Weber in 1992. The marriage (daughter Alana, born 1996) held until 2002. From 2006 to 2016 he was married to soprano Kriemhild Maria Jahn. Wife No. 4 became the Swiss music manager Laura Käfer in 2018. He adopted her daughter Ruby.

In between there was the headlined intermezzo with Nadja Abd el Farrag, the famous temporary part of the life of Dieter Bohlen, who simply called her “Naddel”. Seal was badly in love, but in 2002 she ended the relationship via SMS after four months: “I would like to, but I thought about it again. It doesn’t work. I wish you all the best.” The separation dealt with the media like a major event. Naddel died of multi -organ failure last May.

For some time now, the reports about Ralph Siegel have mostly affected his state of health. From his cancer: “In 2007 I had the first prostate operation, six and a half hours.” In 2010 the disease returned, at that time seal had undergone a seven -week radiation. In 2024 he said “Bild”: “I defeated cancer for the fourth time this year. It was about life and death. (…).”

Siegel’s life is actually a substance for the stage. And he is a real stage animal. He already has the musicals “laugh! The time of the clowns”, “Johnny Blue”, “Zeppelin” and “a little peace” and performed, because he promised his father who died in 1972 that he would appear with a piece of music in New York on Broadway.

So far he has not succeeded. It is not all day evening.