Hounded by Freedom
Observations on the composer Wolfgang Rihm
"My aim is to stir up passion and be passionate. Everything about music is emotional". This assertion about himself on the part of Wolfgang Rihm amounted to nothing less than throwing down the aesthetic gauntlet to the tenets that salvation was to be found in arid constructivism, that there was such a thing as an "objective" state of the "material", that the yearning for immediate expression was a source of suspicion, that the composing subject had, as it were, to restrain himself and keep himself out of his music. It was an almost scandalous credo, a decisive and daring rebuttal of avant-garde orthodoxy. In the mid-seventies a group of younger German composers - apart from Rihm there was Manfred Trojan, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Detlev Müller-Siemens, Hans-Christian von Dadelsen and Hans Jürgen von Bose - created a sensation with a form of aesthetics that distanced itself very clearly from what people generally and mistakenly thought could be dismissed as the "Darmstadt Dogma".
Dynamic and rigorous
Rihm, by far the most important and creative composer of the group, evoked at the time, even in his "swan song scenes", reminiscences of sweeping espressivo gestures a la Mahler and Berg, but he quickly and violently dissociated himself from all neo-emotionalism and neo-tonality. Born in 1952 in Karlsruhe, the composer's work developed a momentum and rigour that is almost without parallel, even in some of its reversals and unpredictabilities. But one characteristic has remained constant throughout all the immense range of his work, namely the physical-emotional, the "haptic", quality of the sound. On no account is he a classicist or a mere sensitive structuralist; his music is always a matter of powerful, even violent, energy informing sonal communication; not seldom are there veritable explosions. In no way is moderation for him a guiding principle. It was evident that he would be drawn to the theatre at an early stage, just as it was clear that politely setting classical texts to music was not a matter that appealed to him. Even his Büchner opera, Lenz, is no "literature opera" in the conventional sense. The authors who attracted him were indeed in no way representative of an exalted intellectual world: Antonin Artaud and Heiner Müller, whose Hamlet machine instigated him to incorporate German history and the theatre as such as themes in his music drama.
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A six-part portrait of Wolfgang Rihm, composer-in-residence at the Salzburg Festival in the year 2000. (Photo: Universal Edition ) |
He was particularly fascinated by the Mexican phantasmagorias of Artaud - texts whose visionary challenges go far beyond the merely narrational and commonplace. Purely from the orchestral point of view, his most way-out work was surely the powerful Donauesching Klangbeschreibung (Descriptions in sound) where the vulgar and the brutal alternate at the extremities of what is still bearable. But one should not for this reason forget his chamber music, which is often highly introverted; his pleasure in virtuoso pieces that are positively infernal; his ability to suddenly throw windows open on tradition with great brusqueness. Rihm is anything but a dogmatician about himself. Quite the contrary, his taste is truly "catholic"; he loves extremes which otherwise one would suppose to be mutually exclusive: Busoni and Pfitzner, Cage and Nono and Schostakovitsch.
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