Lucy Shelton sang Wolfgang Rihm's setting of Wolf Wondratschek's poetry during last season's concert devoted to Rihm's music.

Wolf Wondratschek was born in 1943 in Rudolstadt; he grew up in Karlsruhe and studied literature, science, philosphy, and sociology in Heidelberg, Goettingen, and Frankfurt. Initially inspired by the avant-garde theatre of the absurd of postwar Germany, he took to writing poetry “only as an adult,” and then “not as a poet, but as a writer who writes poems.” He began successfully self-publishing prose, poems, and radio plays during the sixties, inspired by the student-led social movements in Germany and France; what he viewed as the intellectual disillusionment of the next decade convinced him of the necessity of ever more radical aesthetic postures. A lecture tour through American universities furthered the international appreciation of his work.

An adherent to the concept of poetry as music, he has recorded several readings of his work to musical accompaniment, including the 1999 Mood Records release Das Mädchen und der Messerwerfer, a collaboration with the German jazz musicians Wolfgang Schlüter and Michael Naura. His own poems are popular choices for musical settings; they appear with poetry by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in recordings by the German cabaret singer Tim Fischer.

Mr. Wondratschek's latest work is the epistolary novel Kelly-Briefe, an collection of letters from the narrator, a European writer living in New York, and his lover, Kelly, whose cryptic missives are understood only by the narrator, haunted by the notion of love as a “thing without truth.”