Early in Mr. Rihm’s career, highly structural dodecaphonic compositions, or works in which musical parameters were ordered in “rows” of 12, dominated European contemporary music. In contrast, he was sometimes described as a “neo-Romantic,” and he had a reputation as a fiercely independent artist who was constantly reinventing his aesthetic approach.
Failure didn’t seem to daunt him. “I’m also talented at stumbling,” he told Badische Neueste Nachrichten, a Karlsruhe-based newspaper, in 2020. “It’s a very early experience, knowing that one remains unique as one falls down.”
He insisted that great art results from aesthetic liberty and intellectual rigor, not adherence to predetermined ideas about beauty. “Dealing with art, making art, is already in itself a calling to boundless freedom,” he wrote in a 1984 essay. “There can be no deference, and yet in the most brutal way, the law of the strongest applies, namely the strongest idea.”
Mr. Rihm’s music created divergent impressions. In “Dis-Kontur,” he channeled primal acoustic violence; in “Fremde Szenen,” he turned repeated notes into passages of propulsive longing; in “Jagden und Formen,” he reassembled scraps of melody into bustling textures in which small pauses helped create a kinetic whole.
When Mr. Rihm started composing, many of his peers felt that contemporary classical music was at a dead end, with audiences dwindling and composers focused on arcane, abstract structures. His work, physical and deeply engaged with the past, showed that another approach was possible.
“He goes his own way and has always insisted on the freedom of the individual in the Enlightenment sense,” Eleonore Büning, the author of a biography of Mr. Rihm, said in a phone interview. “And that means that he freed himself from all the chains, handcuffs and dogmas connected with dodecaphonic and serial music.”
Read More: Wolfgang Rihm, Prolific Contemporary Classical Music Composer, Dies at 72
