The composer Wolfgang Rihm, who has died aged 72 of most cancers, epitomised most of the challenges confronted by German composers of his era. Older figures, most famously Karlheinz Stockhausen, had addressed the issue of the nation’s Nazi heritage by making an attempt to start out once more from scratch (the place usually known as Stunde Null). In distinction, many youthful composers, equivalent to Rihm, felt an obligation to reincorporate elements of the musical previous: an purpose that led some to be stifled of their creativity.
Rihm, although, was from an early age, not solely assured about his personal compositional voice, but additionally in a position to maintain an plentiful output. By the point of his loss of life, he had written greater than 500 works; a documentary movie about his efforts to proceed composing regardless of sickness (he had been recognized with most cancers in 2017) was made in 2020.
Rihm first got here to huge consideration when his work for string quartet and orchestra, Morphonie, was premiered on the Donaueschingen pageant in 1974.
Whereas Stockhausen had developed strategies of writing serial music impressed by the instance of Anton Webern, his youthful compatriot’s musical language – tonally oriented and emotionally direct – drew on the legacy of Gustav Mahler, the early works of Arnold Schoenberg and, extra usually, expressionism.
Morphonie was branded by one critic as “indecently particular person”. Aged simply 22, Rihm discovered himself a hated new figurehead for an rising German “bratpack” eager to ascertain alternative ways of doing issues – and to search out an viewers that went past the cognoscenti for Neue Musik.
Such a picture, caricatured as postmodernist or merely retrogressive, was to canine Rihm all through his life; he was labelled variously as a consultant of the “new simplicity”, the “new subjectivity” or “neo-expressionism”. His personal accounts of his intentions had been reasonably extra sophisticated.
The motion of Die Hamletmaschine (The Hamlet Machine, 1987), for example – an opera based mostly on Heiner Müller’s play of the identical identify – takes place, as Rihm put it, “in entrance of the ‘ruins of Europe’ whose mud continues to be the perfect nourishment for anybody who needs to confront issues or needs to know the place we got here from”.
This obvious obsession with the previous, nonetheless, was seemingly contradicted by his insistence that “Freedom should be seized … The connecting potential of music is gigantic and infrequently a trouble for me, since I wish to get away of normal contexts.”
An everlasting characteristic of Rihm’s output was his enthusiasm for utilizing pre-existing musical materials in subsequent compositions. Jagden und Formen (Hunts and Varieties), considered one of his most steadily performed items, exists in a number of variations, every a transforming of the earlier one; begun in 1995, it was solely accomplished in 2008. The varied reworkings of Vers une Symphonie Fleuve (In the direction of a River Symphony, 1992-2009) equally assemble what theorists would time period a form of intertextual, multireferential palimpsest. “The ‘symphony’ as such,” its composer stated, “by no means arrives!”
The torrent of titles that constitutes his catalogue contains at the least 9 operas or music-theatre compositions, considered one of which – Jakob Lenz (1978), based mostly on the novel by Georg Büchner – has been extensively seen, together with in Britain, the place it was staged on the Almeida pageant in 1987 and in an ENO manufacturing at Hampstead theatre in 2012. Dwell performances of his works within the UK have often been, at finest, fitful, though these included a Complete Immersion weekend introduced by the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the Barbican in 2010.
Rihm was born in Karlsruhe, south-west Germany, to Julius, an government for the Purple Cross, and his spouse, Margarete. He studied composition with Eugen Werner Velte on the metropolis’s College of Music, and with Stockhausen in Cologne and Klaus Huber in Freiburg. He wrote his first symphony at 17.
Remaining in Karlsruhe for a lot of his life, he himself turned a professor of composition on the College of Music in 1985, the place his college students included Rebecca Saunders and Jörg Widmann (who not too long ago characterised Rihm as “typically manic obsessive and at all times excessive”). Amongst many awards, he obtained the Ernst von Siemens Music prize in 2003 and the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in music on the Venice Biennale in 2010.
Rihm is survived by his third spouse, Verena Weber, whom he married in 2017; a son, Sebastian, from his first marriage, to Johanna Feldhausen, which resulted in divorce; a daughter, Katja, from his second, to Uta Frank, who died in 2013; and his sister Monika.
