Viola and cello entwine closely in the first double song of Wolfgang Rihm. Orchestral voices intertwine, entwine the two. Only the drums call for war and finally let the piece go down in machine gun salvos. Rihm wrote it in 1980, according to his own statement, “out of a pitiful, trembling uncertainty” in the swelling “war clamor” for the First Gulf War. Such political and social references are rare in the work of a composer who sees music essentially as a system that speaks for itself. But there are.
Munich’s Musica Viva dedicated four concerts to Rihm’s 70th birthday on March 13, with secular and sacred works, chamber, orchestral and choral music. Ensembles of the Bavarian Radio, along with some soloists who have been familiar with Rihm for a week, celebrate the most frequently performed living German composer in the Herkulessaal.
Over the years he has composed more elegantly, more pensively
This is not a work show. The work is not only too extensive for that. Rihm’s publishing house, Wiener Universaledition, lists more than four hundred compositions, not counting unpublished works. Despite its importance, it would not be canonical enough in musical thinking. But for the first double song there is also a second and third one, as Rihm keeps writing himself. And that’s why his compositions usually don’t end with a finale, but rather with a twilight or abruptness. The fact that Rihm had been struggling with cancer for years and therefore now has to attend the concerts in Munich in a wheelchair is something he himself interpreted as a dark analogy to a work that proliferates and is essentially an expression of himself. The lustfully circling subjectivity is reflected in a range of means that are difficult or only temporary to bring to a common denominator.
Nevertheless, central works can be experienced, such as “Musik für Drei Streichen”, with which the 25-year-old composer blasted the technocratic constructs of the mainstream at the time in 1977. With a berserk expressive frenzy that makes the hour-long piece a challenge for listeners and performers to this day. Ilya Gringolts, violin, Lawrence Power, viola, and Nicolas Altstaedt, cello heave chord fragments, saw up and shred their instruments. At the end of the first part, frenzied figurations with screeching, squeaking and glissanding sounds become confused in a wild chase, a typical Rihm model. But the composer does not set the desert as an absolute either, it remains broken up by wispy, dancing passages that contain echoes of the classical tradition and at the same time shut them away. A quote from a late Beethoven string quartet sets the titanic bar before all three strings lock into a single piercing D.
Rihm never became a monument to himself, a classic
A few years later, the interest in disinhibiting the senses also shaped the examination of the texts by Adolf Wölfli, who had raped several girls as children before he let his fantasies run wild in the psychiatric ward in crude, infantile verses. In the orchestral version of the “Wölfli-Lieder”, the baritone Georg Nigl captures the barely concealed aggression in heart-penetrating stentoric tones, the derailed eroticism in whispering falsetto. The singer conveys the morbidity of his hometown of Vienna to the words, while the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Ingo Metzmacher contributes folklorically ironic sounds.
No wonder that Rihm likes to compose for Nigl, who is interested in extreme psychograms, most recently in the “Terzines an den Tod” for baritone and piano, which will be premiered at Musica Viva. In the underlying cycle of poems by Albert Vigolei’s Thelen, the lyrically loving I only longs for death, ecstatically conjured up as a brother. Here, Rihm pushes the voice even more strongly than in the Wölfli songs to the fringes, while the piano circles around it. Rihm seems milder here than in the early songs.
In general, it becomes tangible as a development in the excerpts from the work that he over the years more elegantly composed. After all, no one can remain a young savage forever. In 1995, the orchestral work “IN-SCHRIFT”, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, came out in the black of night. Cellos and double basses create an ominous heaviness, which is broken through by hectic tone repetitions of high woodwinds. Then in 2002, in the “Four Studies for a Clarinet Quintet”, a light-filled sound dominated, similar to the clarinet quintet of the late Johannes Brahms. It corresponds to the noble tone of the clarinettist Jörg Widmann, who studied composition with Rihm and has already premiered more than twenty of his works. Unusual playing techniques, such as in the early string trio, are now only rarely used.
Nevertheless, there is also a wild hunt here, the second movement transforms into a raging torrent of sound. The demands on Widmann and the four string players of the BR Symphony Orchestra also remain harsh, in terms of condition and coordination. But the lines now begin to spin more smoothly, intertwine in floating weightlessness, as was to become typical of Rihm’s later work, which – apart from the premiere – hardly comes into its own in the selection. But Rihm never became a monument to himself, a classic. Perhaps that is the most exhilarating thing you can learn about the work of a seventy-year-old here.