Obituary: Wolfgang Rihm: The romantic provocateur

New music with a capital N – since the Weimar Republic this has meant the constant “renewal of used musical material and the musical feeling”. So in the negation of the negation of the previous generation (and so on), everything becomes new again and again: according to a tried and tested pattern of autonomous bourgeois art.

Considering his success, it is not surprising that Wolfgang Rihm was unable to please many critics during his lifetime. While the concept of work dissolved more and more over the course of his career, Rihm wrote work after work with the associated self-confidence. For the hardliners, the music of the Karlsruhe composer, who was born in 1952, was of course too mainstream within the niche, so that the question of how tonal his music was sometimes took on absurd aspects – as if Rihm wasn’t talking about advanced new music at all, but something like that something like neoclassical.

To others, the 1.92 meter tall Rihm seemed almost like a state authority in the (old) Federal Republic or at least like its court composer, so that Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth described him as “a true institution in the music world.” His publisher, Universal Edition, even calls him a “composer for all seasons” – and in fact such labels have been with him for decades.

He celebrated his big breakthrough in 1974 at the Donaueschinger Musiktage with the orchestral piece with solo string quartet “Morphonie” (or with the movement “Sektor IV”, which is the only one to be completed). This then also dictates the musical gesture of the rest of the biography: highly expressive, free-atonal music, deep to existential in expression, meaningful and symbolic, identical to itself and yes, perhaps something like a romantic provocation. Especially for the avant-garde trained in serial music, which very consciously pushed Adorno’s “unconscious historiography” forward through art by constantly expanding the compositional material.

In 1977, the festival with the title “New Simplicity” also gave a name to the box that doesn’t want to be a composition school. Other keywords such as “new subjectivity” or even “neotonality” are mentioned. Rihm himself couldn’t stand these terms anyway because of their “regressive habitus” and countered with “New Clarity” in his text “‘New Simplicity’ – Outcomes and Ideas” from the same year.

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His generation is of course linked to romantic spectrums of expression (clearly, for example, in the song cycle “Das Rot” from 1991 based on texts by Karoline von Günderrode), to principles of harmonious hierarchy and tension, which one could definitely call “classic” in the broadest sense. But not traditionalist or dogmatic. Nevertheless, according to biographer Frieder Reininghaus, Rihm knew early on that he would become “classical” – and perhaps this awareness will finally end an era in which male composers are described as geniuses.

Rihm’s first opera “Jakob Lenz”, which he wrote at the age of 25, is already in the repertoire, as is “The Hamlet Machine” from 1987, based on the famous text by Heiner Müller, who had already revolutionized spoken theater ten years earlier – or His perhaps best musical theater, “The Conquest of Mexico” from 1992. The latter two pieces are called musical theater and not opera because Rihm expressly does not want to create a literary opera with a closed plot. Nevertheless, in terms of emphasis and direct affective power, they have a lot in common with what opera was as a socio-political emotional catalyst in the 19th century.

Contrary to the clichés of neo-romanticism, Rihm also learned from postmodern philosophy and comes across as more critical of ideology than the attributions suggest. This is always the case with Rihm. His pieces age well, and his musical theater in particular is surprisingly contemporary, for example when it puts its finger on colonialism or first increases and then abolishes the authority of the (male) author. You are doing Rihm an injustice if you reduce him to a reactionary minimalist.

Many compositions will remain, for example the Passion setting “Deus Passus” from 2000, which for some was a clever anti-passion that ripped apart Christian certainties of salvation, for others it was too politically correct, and for others it was a private religious traditional piece with too many Bach references . Criticism of Rihm as usual. Or “Hunting and Forming,” an orchestral work that Rihm has been working on in various versions since the mid-90s and which came into its final “State 08” in 2008 – a wild dance that begins with two solo violins and then continues on and on moved into a large, intoxicating form.

Over the years, well over 400, probably even over 500 works have been collected – all composed by hand (and many published as such). This makes Rihm not only the most successful, but also probably the most productive German composer of new music born after the Second World War. His romantic gesture has become less and less resented in recent years, perhaps also because of his Baden warmth. The historical conflicts surrounding Rihm will certainly have something to do with the fact that young composers today can develop individual solutions more carefree (but still far from carefree) from the spectrum of contemporary, subcultural or even classical-romantic music.

Wolfgang Rihm has now died at the age of 72.

Kornelius Paede is chief dramaturge of the music theater department at the Staatstheater Kassel, where a new production of Wolfgang Rihm’s opus “The Hamlet Machine” was staged this year.