Wolfgang Rihm: Two new biographies about the composer – culture

Wolfgang Rihm’s musical thinking iis intellectually sharpened and his music is highly expressive and emotionally charged. It is therefore no wonder that two ambitious and very different Rihm monographs were published for his birthday.

What is the nature of seemingly limitless creativity? How dense is Rihm’s diversity of expression in opera and symphonic heavyweights, chamber music and song? Eleonore Büning and Frieder Reininghaus, both working as music critics for a long time, felt the desire to explore Wolfgang Rihm’s imposing physical and intellectual stature, to measure his artistic radius, the prestige and “success secret” of this man. One fact is rather difficult for critics: the artistic appearance of this composer is considered to be virtually untouchable today. A biography in the usual way would be tantamount to a monument, as a chronicle of his life and work.

But the two books are different. In her description, categorically called “The Biography”, the music author Eleonore Büning admits right at the beginning of her personal closeness to the composer and thus sets an affirmative tone: “Rihm and I, we’ve known each other for thirty-three years, we’re friends.” You used to have him in Berlin taz once called “an epigone” and he then classified her as “plemplem”. Seen today, Rihm is “a special case” in many respects. An out of time? Of course, according to Büning, he writes the notes strictly by hand on paper, he avoids the computer, he avoids experiments such as graphic notation or electronic adventures, he renounces the fashionable sound installations. “It’s really old fashioned,” the author says happily. And accordingly friendly, skeptically relaxed sitting between a lot of greenery, Rihm as the cover hero looks the book buyer in the face.

The musicologist and publicist Frieder Reininghaus, long with the taz and Deutschlandfunk, but does not want to have anything to do with a Rihm biography, he understands his expertise and the treatise to be fundamentally socio-politically sound. Even the cover title clearly reveals a concrete objective: “Rihm. The representative”. The accompanying photo is aimed precisely at this, quite half-ironic: a bitterly serious, almost sullen-looking person is stylized as the state artist of his theatrical introspection, similar to Beethoven. Only the complete subtitle, displayed in the book, speaks plainly: “New Music in the Society of the Federal Republic of Germany”. Sociology of music plus historiography as a Rihm monograph, not a memorial.

The critic Reininghaus is interested in the motives and background of Rihm’s unprecedented rise

The basic conviction of the author Reininghaus applies here, too, that music is “unthinkable without its social functions”. He had recently tried out such an approach in the two-volume handbook “Music and Society” with hundreds of essays by many authors. His Rihm book therefore does not follow a linear “narrative”, but offers a kind of kaleidoscope of 36 loosely graded, non-chronological essays on Rihm’s career, its driving forces, its resounding results, its broad impact. More “why” than “what”.

The three dozen essays are divided into seven “windows of time”, with snappy titles such as “Gourmand, Gourmet and Revolutionary” or “Departure to the innermost being, always emptied” or even “Dionysian, hellish, heavenly”. Biographical insights are combined with historical perspectives from the 1950s to the present day, work portraits, mainly of Rihm’s opera theatre, with concise, often polemical social criticism. The author has not forgotten personal encounters with Rihm, such as the one in a gourmet restaurant, where the high price for a bottle of wine Rihm had ordered provoked his resistance. The critic Reininghaus is interested in the motives and background of Rihm’s unprecedented rise not only in the circles of contemporary music, but also on the stages and podiums of the bourgeois music business.

Open detailed view

The composer himself and his life’s work are described very cleverly, even admired, and yet the author, in his view of Rihm’s confidently generous figure, does not forget the irritating characteristic of the “representative” mentioned in the title, situated in the “cultural establishment of the old Federal Republic”. The historical “reference” for Rihm, despite his friendship with his politically aware colleagues Luigi Nono and Helmut Lachenmann, was the upper class Richard Strauss, “the most representative German musical personality” in the first half of the century.

This, like much else in the book, is debatable. The fact is that Rihm, who was also wide awake in music association politics, never refused to join the committees of musical life: He “decidedly wanted to get involved under the motto he formulated very clearly early on: ‘I want to move and be moved'”. The funny and grim Reininghaus, who lives in Cologne, likes to think of “the Cologne general formula for successful networking: ‘From nothing to nothing'”. All levels in his book, fueled by reading hundreds of magazine and newspaper texts, Rihm’s comments and essays, to a veritable flood of quotations, interlock. The result is stimulating, often exciting, and sometimes contradictory reading.

Rihm is a dialectician, he knows: “Failure is always a certainty. For this reason there is no fear of it.”

Much closer to the norm of biographical balance, Eleonore Büning takes the risk of depicting the life and work, as well as the wealth of material in the extensive, almost incomprehensible catalog of works of her friend Wolfgang Rihm, in a balanced way. However, she manages to go into more than 150 of the musical works briefly or in detail, and then to present the immensely growing Rihm discography exactly. A complete catalog raisonné might have gone beyond her book.

Büning, who patiently examines the intellectual and musical impulses in Rihm’s sound cosmos, relies on the flood of reviews, comments and interviews that have been spread through the media for decades. Own memories of the countless festivals and concerts with Rihm’s music are the pound with which it grows, with balancing descriptions of performances, their meanings, their backgrounds.

Finally, she adds a package of conversations she had herself with Rihm: “25 questions and answers on the everyday life of composing” under the title “Targeted Darkening”. First question, a conclusion: “You are the epitome of crisis-proof composing. You were promised that years ago.” The allusion to a rumored impetus by Luigi Nono: “Wolfgang, you need a crisis.” Rihm thinks further: Yes, “every artist perceives crises in work as an integral part of the work process anyway”. Crises are “transition phenomena. Phases in which something is decided”.

A conclusion? Rihm is a dialectician, he knows: “Failure is always a certainty. For this reason there is no fear of it.” The depiction of such a far-reaching figure as his, whose work, substance and effect is difficult to grasp, requires diligence as a collector and presence of mind, above all empathy. This is what both portrait books stand for.