wolfgang rihm
in conversation with kirk noreen and joshua cody

Wolfgang Rihm is one of the important composers of his generation, and the “best-known representative of the young German musical movement of the ‘New Simplicity,’ perhaps better termed as neoromanticism or neoexpressionism” (Radio-France). Born in 1952 in Karlsruhe, he was writing by age eleven; among his early teachers were Eugen Werner Velte, Wolfgang Fortner, and Humphrey Searle. He attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1970 and during the seventies continued studies (with Stockhausen, Klaus Huber, and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht) while teaching at the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe and composing with characteristic prolificacy, winning the City of Stuttgart Prize (1974) and that of the City of Mannheim (1975).

Feldman and Webern, along with Stockhausen, strongly mark Rihm’s first works; further works disclosed a personality strongly drawn to literature and the arts: the controversial chamber opera Jakob Lenz, to the story by Georg Büchner and Michael Frühling, was performed in 1978; a collaboration with Heiner Müller produced the opera Die Hamletmaschine in 1983. Later influences were Wilhelm Killmayer, Helmut Lachenmann, and especially Luigi Nono, to whom Rihm has dedicated several works. Other notable works include the operas Oedipus (1987), with texts by Rihm after Sophocles, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Müller; Die Eroberung von Mexico (1991), after Antonin Artaud; and the violin concerto Gesungene Zeit, recorded by Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under James Levine. This year Rihm serves as the composer in residence at the Salzburg Festival as well as at the Musica Festival in Strasbourg.

How did you first become interested in musical composition? Is there a specific event or moment that you can recall?

As far as I can remember, whenever I encountered as a child an art form (which I did not, of course, grasp as one but whose radiation must have in some way affected me), I wanted “to do it, too.” To begin with, they were pictures and texts. I can recall that I attempted to copy one of Lovis Corinth’s Walchensee landscapes (with a tree in the middle) by painting it in water colour. My father would enjoy taking me during the course of our Sunday morning walks in my native city to the State Art Gallery. I can also vividly recall exhibitions in the Kunstverein, such as one of portraits by Max Beckmann. Also, I would dictate to my mother stories that I had invented and she would take them down in short hand. Music was the last one to come. By then, I had written hundreds of poems and stories; in the meantime I had started going to school and learned to write.

Were they compositions that you played on a piano or another instrument, or did you think about them compositionally before writing them?

To begin with, I was taught, as customary at the time, to play the recorder. Immediately, I started writing little pieces of the kind I was given to play: we children learned to write notes as we were mastering the instrument. I was very religious at the time and wanted to become a priest. Whenever I could, I made my way to the church. One reason was, of course, that I was deeply attracted by the rites (I was Catholic), the incense, the singing, the music as such—above all the organ.

I wanted to compose a Mass and asked my mother for large-size manuscript paper. I must have been eight or nine years old at the time. I should add that my parents were not particularly musical. They rather enjoyed light music popular at the time, evergreens and the like. Whatever was being broadcast on the radio. They were no church goers, something that rather upset me.

As for my Mass, it came to nothing, of course. I was now studying the piano. My parents bought an old instrument for me, rather a hazardous undertaking: it cost a lot of money (my grandmother had helped us out) and took up a great deal of space (we were living in a three-room flat). My little sister Monika had joined us in 1960.

The Mass was to have been in the style of Mussorgsky’s A Night on the Bald Mountain. That was my first gramophone record. I had heard it on the radio and was bowled over. I was also terribly impressed by Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 and Florent Schmitt’s Psaume. I had the feeling that these were somehow different from the “usual run” of pieces. There was an air of the forbidden about them—the same as about Beethoven’s Eroica, my second record, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. My parents (as I said above, they were not intellectually inclined) let me have my way. I would be sitting for hours and hours at the piano and improvise. The Mass was “in my fingers,” but I could not yet put it down on paper. Indeed, improvisation was for quite some time to be my “salvation.”

I first played the organ at eleven. We were spending the summer holidays in a village near Karlsruhe. Somehow I managed to get permission to ascend to the organ loft, switched on the motor and played for hours (mostly tutti) what I had improvised on the piano. Suddenly—by then it had become evening—the motor stopped working. The inhabitants of the village were so upset by my playing that they cut out the electricity. That was my first experience of public response. Until then, my audience had been made up of schoolmates, teddybears and family—that is, all positively inclined.

Incidentally, I earned my first fee through improvising on the organ. It was once again in the summer, in another village, with a larger instrument and once again, I was improvising for hours on end. All of a sudden, someone came up to the loft (I feared I was going to be thrown out again) but it turned out to be a listener who had apparently been sitting there for a long time and who said he had never heard anything like that before. By way of thanking me, he gave me two marks. I knew then that this profession would never make me rich but would keep me going somehow.

Who were the first contemporary composers you heard in your youth and who were your strongest influences?

The first living composer I met was Zoltán Kodály. It was two years before his death, in 1965. I was by then a member of a large chorus, the Karlsruhe Oratorio Choir, and we were performing the Psalmus hungaricus. I still know the work more or less by heart to this day. Kodály came to the rehearsal and sat there like a saint, his head covered in the mild glory of his grey hair. He then inscribed the vocal scores for us. While his Psalmus hungaricus gave me much pleasure, his Symphony in C major, on the same programme, was all the less enjoyable.

The next composer was Franz Philipp. No one knows his name any more. A tragic figure. He had been something of a mighty personality during the years of national socialism of which I was unaware in 1965. I was enthusiastically singing his liturgical oratorios while he (by then rather rickety) was sitting in the first row, holding his hearing aid in the air. He was more or less deaf and somehow I felt rather sorry for him. When I later realized what power he had wielded in music politics in certain parts of Germany in 1933—1945, his otherworldly ecstasy became tainted by a bitter taste, and I had an inkling of what directions fascination could take. It is quite possible that the devout pieces I was singing at thirteen, with red cheeks, had had completely different texts a few years before.

Several composers would come to the municipal symphony concerts to conduct their works. I can remember how Wolfgang Fortner devastated his vocal piece The Creation, and then turned his attention to Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, only to make a botch of it, too. Or there was Michael Tippett, charmingly chatting away—his music struck me as rather anaemic and “straggly.” However, as a conductor he was much better than Fortner. On one occasion, Jean Françaix played two of his piano concertos—also rather thin, but professional and memorably clean-cut.

The choir sang big pieces. We were one of the first to have Penderecki’s Lukas Passion in our repertoire. In my own section, the second bass, I would give the tone with my tuning fork or with the help of a keyboard instrument. The work exerted quite an influence on my youthful soul. Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien made an even stronger impression. To this day, I cannot and will not free myself from the sombre glow of this music.

By the way, choral singing proved to be my best education. Nowhere else have I learned so much about the inner functions of music, especially when the ensemble was accompanied by an orchestra. I became acquainted with the realities of orchestral playing from the position of a listener right in the middle of the sound. And since I had to look out for the signs given by the conductor and pay attention to dynamics and so on, my hearing and seeing were always related to practical matters, they were never purely trained to be receptive.

But you asked me about influences, about composers. Those who influenced me most of all were initially my teachers, of course.

What teachers had the most influence on you, and why?

As a sixteen-year-old secondary school pupil, I began my regular composition studies with Eugen Werner Velte, at the Music Academy in Karlsruhe. I had had to apply for a special permission to do so. The musicologist Walter Kolneder, author of a very beautiful book on Webern which I had naturally devoured, was Director. He thought very highly of a wild organ phantasy that I had composed in 1967 and was all for my taking up my studies with Velte.

Velte was a wonderfully generous person. I was encouraged to visit him whenever I wanted, I did not need to keep to any rigid schedule. I spent every free minute in his classes. I learned from him most of all about the music of Webern. Naturally, I was composing twelve-tone music, but in my own way, whatever that may have meant. He let me do what I wanted. Some thorny fruits were the result, such as my Symphony No 1, Op 3, dedicated “to the memory of Karl Amadeus Hartmann.” Humphrey Searle, who visited Karlsruhe a number of times as a guest of Walter Kolneder, commented on this piece: “It has been written with blood.” I was proud and regarded it as a kind of dubbing. Searle was very good at talking about Dylan Thomas. Perhaps there lies the explanation for my preference for malt whiskeys.

Velte’s Beethoven analyses were unforgettable. He discussed the late quartets in terms of compositions with tone series. It left me with the indelible impression of music which was highly organized and at the same time burst with expressive power. This showed me that it was after all possible to write such music. With Schönberg, whom today I love for his compositional fire, I then had the impression that the expressive faculties of his music had suffered when he was composing with twelve-tone rows. I felt that his third and fourth string quartets were almost “academic” in their coolness. Needless to say, I loved Berg above everybody else, even though I could not help believing that he had lived in sultry rooms replete with far too many crocheted table cloths. I welcomed Debussy as a liberator (he may have lived in even sultrier rooms than Berg, but…) His forms conveyed the impression that they had really been shaped to fit their own mould, exactly so, to fill that particular space and no other. There was really no need for any tiresome discussion about form “to be filled”—stemming from the idea that composers have recourse to existing forms, so that they can “fill” them. With Debussy, I felt the imperative need to invent form from scratch again and again and bear all the responsibility for it. Each one only exists once.

I traveled once a month to Heidelberg and showed my scores to Fortner. Mostly he had no time, but he did give me some good advice—that of a practician.

As from 1970, I paid regular visits to the Darmstadt summer courses. Of all the composers I met there, Stockhausen made the strongest impression, of course. I found his uncompromising nature refreshing. Of me, he seemed to be taking a view tinged with worry and benevolence. On one occasion, he sent me a note consisting of the following words and nothing else:

Dear Wolfgang Rihm,

Please only heed your inner voice.
With kindest regards.

Yours,
Karlheinz Stockhausen.

It hung for many years above my desk—until the green felt-tip had begun to fade. The words will never do so. His advice was decisive: that I should not heed the opinion of others but rather take the risk of embarking on my own path.

In 1972, after taking my final examinations at the secondary school and finishing my studies with Velte, I went to Cologne to work with Stockhausen. Although I only stayed for a short while, it was an enormously inspiring time. He never discussed the music of his pupils, only his own. But that was precisely the right thing to do, because that is how I could learn from him. He analyzed Momente throughout the term; we attended the rehearsals and the world premiere of the big new version. An experience like that leaves a lasting mark. However, it should not necessarily lead to imitation.

The most original of my co-students was undoubtedly Claude Vivier, a jolly, likeable man who composed lovely music. I believe Stockhausen found him rather too jolly by half. On the other hand, he seemed to appreciate those of his pupils who were going their own way and rather looked down upon those who believed to be acting in his spirit.

In 1973, I moved to Freiburg, partly I suppose to be nearer to my girlfriend who was studying sociology. I became a pupil of Klaus Huber’s who, unlike Stockhausen, took a keen interest in the works of his students. He put the art of conversation as a pedagogical means in the centre of his teaching and gathered around him a group of young people no less avid than those around Stockhausen. I was not terribly keen to have anyone interfering with my work and mostly submitted my compositions after I had drawn the double bar line.

Huber immediately spotted the strong points and the weaknesses. I did a fair amount of thinking and drew my conclusions before embarking on the next piece. I had by then acquired the habit of writing works which added up to cycles by fashioning their forms anew, “painting” another layer on top of the existing one, inserting new sections, etc. Any improvements were made in new pieces rather than subjecting an old one to thorough correction. This procedure appears to me to be more natural: I regard the birth of creative individuality as a micro-process akin to evolution.

Velte had conveyed to me the analytical dimension as well as the desire for expression, with all its tensions and emotions. Stockhausen had taught me the significance of intuition and, above all, a sure sense of duration and proportion. Thanks to Huber, the philosophical and ethical aspect of my compositional work had been reinforced, further strengthened by my studies with Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht at the University. Eggebrecht led me to a permanent consideration of the notion of form in music. He was at the time head of the faculty of musicology in Freiburg and his lectures on Mahler gave (after Adorno) a basically new direction to thinking with regard to that composer.

In the course of my life, again and again, I have had encounters with people from whom I could learn a great deal. I hope it will stay this way. Conversations with Luigi Nono, Morton Feldman, Wilhelm Killmayer and Helmut Lachenmann (or indeed, times we spent with one another in wordless stillness, which is also important) have taught me a lot. Those experiences would give me strength to go my own way. If I had imitated any of them or had assumed the role of a follower, our relationship would have been destroyed.

I attempt, as long as I can, to pose questions. Perhaps I can only hear and understand what I want to hear and understand… But I do believe to have the talent to be uncertain in a productive fashion. It would be terrible if my talks with young colleagues, even with my own pupils, did not place a huge question mark over everything I do.

Incidentally, I also learn from non-musicians sometimes. I am passionately drawn to the fine arts and it can be liberating to be talking to painters about the secrets surrounding the birth of works of art, about work processes in general.