2024-08-01 19:16:54
He was a star, yet lived in seclusion. Wolfgang Rihm, one of the most important contemporary German composers, died at the age of 72, DPA wrote. The author of the composition for the ceremonial opening of the Elbe Philharmonic building in Hamburg, whose opera Jakob Lenz from the late 1970s is one of the most performed modern works in the genre, died in a hospice near Karlsruhe.
According to DPA, Wolfgang Rihm was bursting with ideas and creative energy. Despite his extraordinary success, he lived modestly. With his sometimes dark, sometimes strongly rhythmic and sometimes transparently fragile works, he was able to appeal to listeners who are not looking for contemporary music. He created over 500 works including operas, string quartets or chamber pieces for violin and piano.
He mastered both traditional and avant-garde techniques. In his works, it was possible to find both a piano waltz lasting a few seconds, as well as almost two hours of music for the ballet Tutuguri for a large orchestra and choir.
He did not stop working even after doctors diagnosed him with cancer in 2017. “Am I supposed to sit and wait until I die?” he asked in a documentary film made about him by the German television station SWR. During his treatment, he completed, among other things, a cello concerto or a composition commissioned by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.
Rihm became professor of composition at the University of Karlsruhe in 1985, where he later taught Jörg Widmann and Rebecca Saunders, among others. At the beginning of the millennium, he received the prestigious German Ernst von Siemens Prize for contemporary music, in 2010 he became the laureate of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. Four years later, he added the Schumann Prize for poetry and music.
He led the festival’s academy in Lucerne, Switzerland, where he nurtured young talents, and was to be composer-in-residence of the Berlin Philharmonic in the upcoming 2024/2025 season. His composition is on the program of the opening concert of the season, which the orchestra will perform on September 12 under the baton of chief conductor Kirill Petrenko.
Wolfgang Rihm was supposed to be the composer-in-residence of the Berlin Philharmonic next season. | Photo: Universal Edition
“At times he was something of a modern-day composer at court,” compared critic Manuel Brug in Die Welt.
Rihm started composing as a teenager. He studied composition in his native Karlsruhe, from where he continued to Cologne. There he studied with the important author Karlheinz Stockhausen, although Rihm’s early works following romanticism or expressionism from the beginning of the century were perceived by some as a rebellion against the avant-gardists Stockhausen or Pierre Boulez.
Nevertheless, the German also became friends with this French composer and conductor. “Rihm composes with an enviable, imaginative ease,” praised Boulez.
Rihm first drew attention to himself in the 1970s, when he performed the composition Morphonie at the Days of New Music in Donaueschingen, Germany. “Criticism once labeled him as a representative of the new simplicity, neo-romanticism or postmodernism. However, none of these labels fit very well,” composer Miroslav Pudlák wrote in His Voice magazine.
According to him, Rihm’s works from the 1970s were characterized by powerful expressive gestures and used a large range of harmonies and a maximum range of dynamics. In the following decade, the layering of sound was replaced by economy and more subtle work with harmony and color. “In this respect, Rihm claims to be influenced by the late period of Luigi Nono, with whom he had a friendly relationship,” stated Pudlák.
Rihm’s works were also heard in the Czech Republic. | Photo: Monika Rittershaus
In the last decade, Rihm created a sensation when he gave the world premiere of the opera Dionysus or a new production of his older opera The Conquest of Mexico from the turn of the 1980s and 1990s at the Salzburg Festival.
In 2017, he composed the song cycle Reminiscence for the ceremonial opening of the Elbe Philharmonic building in Hamburg. He dedicated it to the memory of the playwright and prominent Hamburg native Hans Henny Jahn.
Three years ago, Czech listeners could hear Rihm’s composition Ernster Gesang, translated as Serious Singing. The work, inspired by the late songs of Johannes Brahms, was performed by the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Petr Popelka.
In the same year, the chamber vocal ensemble Cappella Mariana and the Prague string quartet fama Q performed the author’s composition Et lux from 2009, an hour-long meditation on the words of the Latin requiem, at the Contempuls festival in Prague, the New Music Exhibition in Brno or the Ostrava days.
Rihm’s Vigil was performed at the Easter Sacred Music Festival in Brno, while oboist Vilém Veverka performed Rihm’s Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra in Hradec Králové with the local philharmonic.
In 2011, Rihm was a guest at the Ostrava Days biennial, where his composition was performed by the acclaimed Jack Quartet. Other works by him, such as Styx and Léthé for cello and orchestra, were on the program of the Hudební Forum festival in Hradec Králové.
Video: The radio orchestra plays Wolfgang Rihm
In 2021, the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Petr Popelka, performed Ernster Gesang by Wolfgang Rihm. | Video: SOČR