Wolfgang Rihm: Spheres

TRACKS TO WOLFGANG RIHM

Born in Karlsruhe, Wolfgang Rihm dealt with painting, literature and music at an early age. He began to compose at the age of nine and studied composition with Eugen Werner Velte and later with Wolfgang Fortner in his hometown while still at high school. In 1970 he attended the Darmstadt Summer Course for the first time. Further studies followed with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne (composition) and with Klaus Huber (composition) and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (musicology) in Freiburg. The breakthrough came with the orchestra piece Morphonia - Sector IV at the Donaueschinger Musiktage in 1974. Rihm received numerous prizes and awards, including: Rome Prize from the Villa Massimo (1979), Beethoven Prize from the City of Bonn (1981), Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (2003), Federal Cross of Merit (1989), Great Federal Cross of Merit (2011 ), Grand Cross of Merit with Star (2014), European Church Music Prize (2017). Rihm began teaching in 1973, and since 1985 he has been a professor of composition at the Karlsruhe Music Academy. He lives in Karlsruhe and Berlin.

Wolfgang Rihm is undoubtedly one of the most successful composers of our time and can now look back on an enormous oeuvre that can hardly be classified into a specific style. Early shaping through familiarity with the "sister arts", comprehensive humanistic education, initially musical influences from his teachers and the Schönberg school, which of course always corresponded with a strong connection to the classic-romantic tradition and a very personal expressiveness, result in a highly idiosyncratic and sometimes a refreshingly transverse musical language to the prevailing ideology of New Music. operas like Jacob Lenz, The Hamlet Machine or Oedipus, songs and choral works show Rihm's strong reference to the text (similar to Orlando di Lasso), who, however, also shows his very own profile with his wide-ranging, colourful, gestural orchestral pieces and the diverse chamber and ensemble music.

To this day, Rihm has remained true to his compositional credo from 1974: “My way of working is often vegetative. This gives me the opportunity to follow my material in places where it grows on its own and sometimes find more than I'm looking for. The composing must be open, not the form. It is important to me to compose musical works. For me, a work, a composition, is first and foremost a sum of expressive values ​​that are brought together on the basis of a secondary formal decision. The form is itself an expressive value.

In his program notes for the ensemble recherche in October 2003 (obviously wrested from him with difficulty), Wolfgang Rihm says: »We live in literal times. Many consider music to be another form of text. Maybe she is, but her text is definitely not made up of words. Nevertheless, we put texts before and next to the music: words, sentences, opinions. A play of meanings, irrelevant to what really sounds. A composer who 'says' something about his music in words is a charming idiot at best, an imposter at worst. The refusal of a text is also a text«.

The problem addressed here is even more acute for those who write about the music of others in an analytical or emotionally penetrating manner. Let's think of Franz Grillparzer ("Music described is like a menu without food") or Alban Berg, who after his incoming Wozzeck-Self analysis asked the audience to forget all this and just go to an opera. And yet let's try to trace the works of Wolfgang Rihm. In his own words if possible.

sphere after sphere for ensemble (1992 / 2003)

According to Wolfgang Rihm, »Text families develop over the years. Some pieces carry genetic material that was put into the world decades ago«. She is also with sphere after sphere quite clearly "or better: clearly become indistinct, because the transformation and erosion of the texts is an element of their expressive change, indispensable for their shape, which shows itself in ceaseless change". In this case, the constant transformation began in 1990 with the piece ...et nunc, in the second version of which came a solo piano part, which was then »left free« (post study) before he Sphere after study and finally »as in medieval parody masses« 2003 an integral part of sphere after sphere became – »where sound spheres around sound spheres around the ›old material‹ form again. I consciously put it like this: 'they form'. Because my task seemed to me more and more to be that of a helper who enables growth potentials to develop according to their own laws.

sphere after sphere is thus at the last point so far where the 'old' genetic material from the early 90s developed after taking the first path.« (A second path led to a large series of orchestral works.) Also the connection with the sequence of works over the line is important to Rihm, "who is committed to the phenomenon of the melodic train, the melic flow." And: "The purest and perhaps most radical is the unattainable, which constantly eludes you in the middle of these experiments" and "the decisive question: how and where does the energy flow from. Gradually, it may have been possible to liberate something like the surface of singing from a series of vertical ('cuneiform') settings. compositions like sphere after sphere are also to be understood from this point of view. Also."

four times Pieces for clarinet in A (2000)

four times? Just four times the clarinet alone and yet four times in the sense of a monument, tomb, whatever. With these pieces, Rihm constantly takes the A clarinet to the limits of its sound space, using extreme gestures - high registers, sharply contoured dynamics, alternating between threefold piano and triple forte. The clarinet solos can be heard as a “line progression”, as a “stroke of a brush”. The four times are »less the development of a germ than the trace of a search movement« (Ulrich Mosch). The four movements are different: the first movement is marked »Free, not fast«, the second »Very slowly, as if from far away«, the third »In urging unrest«, the fourth »Slow« - information which are reminiscent of Robert Schumann's or Gustav Mahler's movement designations, probably not entirely by chance.

Seraphin Sphere for ensemble (1993–1996 / 2006)

The most recent piece by Wolfgang Rihm, which premiered in 2006, is another example of the constant adaptation of one's own themes, of the constantly renewed "harmonies of the spheres" (Kepler). Then Seraphin Sphere is based on a stage work that premiered in its first state in 1993 and in its second state in 1996: Seraphin. attempt at theatre for voices (without lyrics) and instruments based on the manifesto of the same name by the French theater visionary Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), the founder of the »Theatre of Cruelty«, often referred to as the »father of performance« – theater not as action, but theater as action itself. Artaud's source of inspiration, Charles Baudelaire's (1821–1867) »Séraphin« essay about a theater in the »artificial paradise« of a hashish intoxication, was the inspiration for this musical theater far removed from conventional opera. In Seraphin Sphere the further developed worlds of »Séraphin« connect with those of the »Spheres«.

Let Wolfgang Rihm have the last word: »If I now leave the superficial surface of this text via a program in order to return to the essential area of ​​compositional work [...], am I doing this as an idiot or as an imposter? Let's be merciful and let's face it mixtum compositum to: I do it as a composer«.

Gottfried Franz Kasparek