wolfgang rihm
page two

You began to write music in the 1970s and 80s that used triadic harmonies, which was very much against the grain and even taboo in European postwar music. Was this avant-garde reaction against the “avant-garde” or did you simply have such a deep connection to music from the 18th and 19th centuries that it would surface in your music?

I am every inch an intuitive composer. Even if I weren’t one, I could only write my music. You can’t create art with taboos. Of course, just breaking taboos does not make for art either. In both cases, there arise objects which may resemble art. These objects find an outlet in specific circles—they may be of vital importance there, to keep the discourse going. In the long run, however, all that remains are intentions. And, if all you have in approaching art is intentions, you will only reap “aha!” responses.

As I have indicated before: everything I produce has continuity. That is part of my make-up. Thank God, there exist a great many different kinds of creative temperament. At all times and of equal value.

When I first tried to find my bearings in so-called avant-garde circles, I was amazed by the readiness there for composers to relinquish their individuality. Trends seemed to be more relevant than personal statements. The same was true of music criticism. Critics would first find a slot for a particular piece and then, perhaps, would try and see what it was.

Of course, it is important to view all that in perspective: when in 1973 one of my works included an a-minor triad, it struck the orchestral musicians as aggressive noise, the listeners heard it as cacophony and the critics viewed it as a conservative relict.

Apart from the perspective of reception, its context should also be borne in mind. Art at that time was viewed in a highly particularistic manner. For instance: a tone on the violin, produced with vibrato, was supposed to be regressive, a scratching noise was progressive. The situation has since changed enormously but some of it is still to be felt in the way a musical work of art is judged by its means of expression before its message is grasped.

Many of my colleagues were desperate. The newspapers reproached one for being outmoded whereas the public refused to hear “newfangled trash.” I felt instinctively that I had no other choice but to do what I really wanted, what stemmed from nothing but my subjectivity. It led to a highly controversial response from the very beginning: a great deal of resistance but also a great deal of support.

I gradually learnt to learn from all that: I realized that in some cases, resistance was more productive than support.

All along, my music has had great breadth. I know, that is something out of the ordinary. One was used to having an artist do the same thing all the time. This impression was also furthered by artists of both sexes who wanted to be identifiable by a logo. For me, artists like Picasso, Mozart or Goethe were always closer than the monists.

Back to triads: I was by no means the only one to apply them. Perhaps in my music they struck one as being more provocative, probably because they did not serve the purpose of guaranteeing “beauty” but were being used as equals next to (almost) every other manifestation of sound, governed by expressive currents which could not be thoroughly analyzed in any rational fashion. That was tantamount to high treason in the eyes of Modernity.

On this score, the situation has relaxed. Look at England. There you find highly talented young composers having success with concepts which twenty-five years ago would have damned my colleagues to purgatory. I am absolutely certain that all that will settle down eventually, I do not worry at all. And: there is nothing wrong with something establishing itself if it has the inherent strength to do so.  

You have an incredibly vast amount of knowledge in music. Helmut Lachenmann told me he knew no one else that had the breadth of knowledge in music as you have. However, you have been criticized for being too much of a chameleon in your music, meaning changing compositional styles (a very difficult term in defining music) far too frequently. Is this something you are consciously aware of?

Style only exists through artists who produce it. No one can “change styles.” I know there is the widely held view that young artists are faced with the question: “in which style shall I work?”

That is, of course, nonsense. Style will only be perceived after it has existed. In my case where everything arises in my own responsibility, subjectively, without having recourse to any particular theories, it is doubly nonsensical to talk of “changing styles.” That has to do with the phenomenon I hinted at above: means of expression are regarded as “style.” A violin plays a note—aha, classical! A scratch—wow, new music! One’s contemporaries think in terms of pigeonholes anyway and are convinced that confusion was never greater than in their own time.

If you take a closer look, however, you will realize to what extent the phenomena are embedded in a continuity. It needs time, of course, but my “leaps” differ in no way from those of other composers who allow themselves to develop and who do not have a desire to be nothing but their own brand in fifty years’ time.  

Many contemporary composers sound “contemporary” because they consciously write in a vaguely post-war contemporary idiom. However, your music seems to be free of the trappings of a single style. Could you comment on the term “style” with regard to music?  

I am not my own musicologist. Neither do I wish to issue recipes as to how my art is to be interpreted. I only want to make sure that my works retain their individuality: they are individuals with a physiognomy of their own, they have a destiny, they come and go and come again. I really have nothing more to say to that.

My work stems from questions. I always begin in a state of knowing nothing. I have no aid in having a “style,” or possessing a means of avoiding style. More and more I am aware of one trait I have: my subjectivity. I am responsible for my music.  

We are opening our concert with the trilogy Pol—Kolchis—Nucleus.  

Pol, Kolchis and Nucleus are three short, self-standing pieces. The same way as a painter who enters his studio one morning and realizes that three pictures who happen to be standing side by side actually form a triptych, I, too, had the impression all of a sudden that they belong together. I tried it out and found it was possible.

In the meantime, both Pol and Nucleus have undergone a further development and have become part, through multiple transformation and partially being “painted over,” of the 60-minute ensemble work Jagden und Formen. Kolchis, inspired by a plastic work of the painter Kurt Kocherscheidt, has given birth to another process which is now leading towards the composition Recherche: Seraphin and will then probably join the maelstrom Jagden und Formen.

Pol in its initial shape was written to mark Paul Sacher’s ninetieth birthday. Nucleus was composed for Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain. Both titles indicate that I regard the pieces as points of departure, batteries of energy, to be unfolded further.  

O Notte is dedicated to Dallapiccola.

Dallapiccola did not exert any particular influence on my music. At the time of his death in 1975, I had been studying his opera Il Prigioniero—it impressed me very much indeed. Spontaneously, I composed this Michelangelo setting and included a “distant” quotation of a motif from the opera. I was surely particularly impressed by the cantabile character of his vocal lines; it reinforced me in my desire to turn my back on the “contemporary” style of singing with its continual “hee-ha-up-and-down,” which appeared to me suspect.

Like me, Wolf Wondratschek grew up in Karlsruhe. In our youth we never met; I think he is ten years older than I am. Early on, he was one of the best known lyric poets in Germany. His poems today are regarded as classics and are part of the curriculum.

He had heard some of my music and read about me. In 1981, he wrote me from Munich, where he lives, and sent me his new poems. It was poetry that I might perhaps never have set to music; but our acquaintanceship, the occasional encounters with his very authentic personality (he loves box matches and classical music)—all this motivated me to go back again and again to his work. In this way, I sensed something of its individual beauty. His work is different different from everything I had ever considered setting. And yet it fits my way of thinking, so irregular in its way, not to steer clear of this “different-ness." It did me a world of good to face the challenge.