Wolfgang Rihm

Rihm pursued a freedom of expression, combining avant-garde techniques with emotional individuality. His chamber opera Jakob Lenz was premiered in 1977, exploring the inner conflict of a poet's soul. The premiere of his opera Oedipus at Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1987 was broadcast live and recorded as DVD. When his opera Dionysos was first performed at the Salzburg Festival in 2010, it was voted World Premiere of the Year by Opernwelt. He was commissioned to compose a work for the opening of the Elbphilharmonie, and created the song cycle Reminiszenz which was premiered in 2017. Rihm was professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe from 1985, with students including Rebecca Saunders and Jörg Widmann. He was composer in residence for the BBC, at the Lucerne Festival and the Salzburg Festival. He was honoured as an officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2001 and received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2003.

Rihm was born in Karlsruhe on 13 March 1952. His parents were Julius Rihm, a treasurer for the Red Cross, and Margarete, a homemaker. He grew up with a sister, Monika. The boy began to compose at age eleven, and wrote a plan for a mass the following year. He was an enthusiastic choir singer, and he often improvised on the organ, creating "sound orgies" in the style of French organists. His cello sonata earned him a prize at the Jugend musiziert competition at age 16. He wrote his second string quartet at age 18. At the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe, he studied music theory and composition with Eugen Werner Velte while still attending secondary school. He took his undergraduate final exams in 1972, when he graduated from secondary school. He attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse from 1970 and studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne from 1972 to 1973. Rihm then enrolled at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg from 1973 to 1976, studying composition with Klaus Huber and musicology with Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht. His other teachers included Wolfgang Fortner and Humphrey Searle.

Rihm lived in Karlsruhe and Berlin. He was married to Johanna Feldhausen-Rihm; they had a son, Sebastian. The marriage ended in divorce. He married Uta Frank in 1992; they had a daughter, Katja. They separated, and Uta Frank died in 2013. He married Verena Weber in 2017. His friend, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, said in an interview: "In a certain way he was an anti-ascetic character", taking pleasure in living. About cooking for friends, Sloterdijk said: "There was always a certain level of form and a certain inventive height. He never just cooked a simple recipe. He was always improvising and inventing." Rihm was diagnosed with cancer in 2017. He said in an interview in 2020: "Of course, like every person, I'm physically approaching the end. But I'm not at the end of my creative energy." Rihm died in a hospice in Ettlingen on 27 July 2024, at the age of 72, after battling cancer for many years.

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The premiere of Rihm's Morphonie at the 1974 Donaueschingen Festival launched his career in the European new music scene. It was regarded as "indecently individual" ("unanständig individuell"). Rihm pursued expressive freedom in clear opposition to established norms. He combined the techniques of then-contemporary classical music with the emotional volatility of Gustav Mahler and the musical expressionism of Arnold Schönberg. Rihm later cited Claude Debussy, saying that Debussy and the expressionist Schönberg combined "minimal formalism and system with the maximal expression". Many regarded this as a revolt against the early Darmstadt School generation of Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. His Dis-Kontur (1974) has been described as "rusty and brutal", "channeling primal acoustic violence". When Sub-Kontur (1975) was premiered in Donaueschingen (1976), the audience complained about Rihm's "brutal noise". Some critics called it a "fecal piece". But positive reviews of his early work led to many commissions in the following years. His chamber opera Jakob Lenz premiered in 1977; it explores the inner conflict of a poet's soul without following a linear narrative. In 1978 he became a lecturer at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. From 1985 onward, he was a composition professor at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe, succeeding his teacher Velte. Rihm followed Velte's approach of educating in open dialogue with the individual student, cultivating freedom of thought. His opera Die Hamletmaschine, composed between 1983 and 1986 based on Heiner Müller's play, Hamletmachine, premiered at the Nationaltheater Mannheim in 1987. It was described as a "total theatre of sound" and a "non-narrative, ritualistic drama" reminiscent of Stockhausen. He based the libretto for his opera Oedipus, commissioned by Deutsche Oper Berlin on the Greek tragedy by Sophocles and related texts by Friedrich Nietzsche and Heiner Müller. The premiere in October 1987, directed by Götz Friedrich, was broadcast live and recorded as DVD. Rihm's work continued in an expressionist vein. However, the influence of Luigi Nono, Helmut Lachenmann, and Morton Feldman, amongst others, affected his style significantly.

Rihm's students included Rebecca Saunders, David Philip Hefti, Márton Illés, and Jörg Widmann. Saunders said about his teaching that "he fought steadily and consequently against polemic thinking, and he encouraged a decidedly personal aesthetic unique to each of his many students." Widmann characterized Rihm as "sometimes manic-obsessive and always extreme".

At Walter Fink's invitation, Rihm was the fifth composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 1995. The same year, he contributed Communio (Lux aeterna) to the Requiem of Reconciliation. The Free University of Berlin awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1998. In 2003 Rihm received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, as... one of the most prolific and versatile composers of our time. With inexhaustible imagination, a vital creative drive and keen self-reflection, he has created an oeuvre rich in facets, which already comprises over four hundred compositions from all musical genres. Rihm's music manifests his belief in the indestructible existence of the creative individual, who is able to assert his strength and dignity against all external threats. The New York Philharmonic commissioned and premiered his Two Other Movements in 2004. Matthias Rexroth sang his Kolonos | 2 Fragments by Hölderlin after Sophokles for countertenor and small orchestra in 2008 at the Bad Wildbad Kurhaus, with Antonino Fogliani conducting the Virtuosi Brunensis. In 2009 Rihm's opera Proserpina premiered successfully at the Schwetzingen Festival. In March 2010, the BBC Symphony Orchestra featured Rihm's music in one of their 'total immersion' weekends at the Barbican Centre in London. Using recordings from that weekend, BBC Radio 3 dedicated three Hear and Now programmed to his work. On 27 July 2010, his opera Dionysos (on Nietzsche's late cycle of poems Dionysian-Dithyrambs) was premiered at the Salzburg Festival by Ingo Metzmacher with sets designed by Jonathan Meese. In Opernwelt magazine, this performance was voted by critics World Premiere of the Year. The Trio Accanto premiered his Gegenstück (2006, rev. 2010) for bass saxophone, percussion, and piano on 16 August 2010, celebrating the 80th birthday of Walter Fink. Anne-Sophie Mutter and the New York Philharmonic premiered his violin concerto Lichtes Spiel (Light Games) in Avery Fisher Hall on 18 November 2010. In 2016 Rihm became artistic director of the Lucerne Festival Academy where young musicians, directors and composers are trained in music of the 20th and 21st centuries. On 11 January 2017, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg was inaugurated with the premiere of Reminiszenz, a song cycle for tenor and large orchestra that he composed on a commission for the occasion. Rihm wrote and dedicated Concerto en Sol to cellist Sol Gabetta in 2020. It was reviewed as a radiant musical portrait. Among his last works were a Stabat Mater and the song cycle Terzinen an den Tod.

1983 Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste 1986 Academy of Arts, Berlin 1996 Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, Darmstadt 2000 Freie Akademie der Künste Hamburg European Academy of Sciences and Arts

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