Wolfgang Rihm: the musical omnivore
The taxi driver knows immediately who I’m going to see when I tell him the address I need in Karlsruhe. “That’s Professor Rihm, right?” I’m a wee bit bemused that someone I’ve never met in this beautiful, stately town near Germany’s French and Swiss borders knows that I’m here to meet its most famous musical resident – Wolfgang Rihm, one of the most brilliant, inventive, and prolific composers alive today. “We pick him up all the time. He doesn’t drive, so he knows us all pretty well. He’s a really nice guy.”
Rihm belongs to Karlsruhe. He was born and raised here, he sang in the city’s choirs, played the church organs, and now teaches at the conservatoire. The flat where he lives is a stone’s throw from his first family home.
Rihm, 57, is a big, hearty, and big-hearted man. “Let me show you my whisky collection,” he says five minutes after I arrive. He’s proud of a handful of rare single malts that have probably never been in the same drinks cabinet together, and we share an astonishingly good 1982 Glenfarclas at his work desk. The desk is the only clear space in Rihm’s rooms, each of which is lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. On the floor are piles of CDs and manuscript paper. A Steinway grand piano groans under the weight of scores, books and yet more CDs. It’s an orderly chaos, I suggest. He smiles. “That’s the combination I need. The one corrects the other, so it achieves a kind of equilibrium. Like in my music.”
Anyone trying to get to grips with Rihm’s music is faced with an immediate problem: there’s so much of it. Unlike the majority of today’s composers, for whom a new piece might appear once or twice a year, Rihm’s music seems to flow from him in a constant stream of unstoppable creativity. He has written more than 400 pieces in every genre you can think of – and some you definitely can’t, since Rihm invented them. If you listen to a CD of, say, Jagden und Formen, his open-ended ensemble work from 2001, you’re thrown into the middle of a torrent of vitalising musical energy that grabs you and doesn’t let go for 50 minutes. But if you listen next to Sotto Voce, a recent piano concerto, you’re soothed by seductive, sensual textures and friendly, familiar harmonies. Then try a music theatre piece such as The Hamlet Machine, and you’re back in the realms of serious, hard-edged expressionism; but turn to one of his waltzes for piano duet and you’ll hear a warm-hearted homage to the world of 19th-century light music. Will the real Wolfgang Rihm please stand up?
The real Wolfgang Rihm is sitting in front of me. He tells me how he composes. “Everyone has their own nature. Composition is not easy for me: I don’t compose quickly, but I compose steadily. I can concentrate very well, and I can stick at one thing for a long time.” And composition is what Rihm does: unlike many of his colleagues, he doesn’t conduct, but he does teach, one day a week. “I always make time for my work.” So much so that he keeps his work space apart from his family home (married twice, he has two children) to preserve his routine.
And Rihm is always working. He tells me about the opera he is writing for this year’s Salzburg festival. Called Dionysos, it’s a “fantasy opera,” as he puts it, based on Nietzsche’s last work, his collection of poems Dionysos-Dithyramben. He shows me how the inscrutable pencil markings in his sketchbooks are transformed into fair copy by Rihm’s clear, precise fountain pen (he writes all his scores by hand). I see the music he has composed for the nymphs, dolphins and narrators, and how the piece fuses myth with the reality of Nietzsche’s biography. There seems to be hardly any mistakes or crossings-out in the manuscript – as if the composition were a seamless, uninterrupted flow.
But that’s not how it happens. “Every day I go through the same crisis,” Rihm says. “I sit there and nothing comes. But I win the struggle, because every day, I write. And this crisis refreshes me. But it can be terrible, too – I become depressed if no ideas are there. It’s always difficult at the beginning of a piece, when nothing is there, and at the end, when I don’t know how to finish. And it’s the same whether it’s a two-hour opera or a little waltz.”
Rihm has written a handful of operas, but shamingly, the last time one of them was heard in the UK was 1980, when Pierre Audi directed his biggest hit, the chamber-opera Jakob Lenz (Audi will also direct the new piece in Salzburg). British audiences get the opportunity next weekend to hear a little more of Rihm’s output in what will be the biggest celebration of his music in the UK in years. The BBC Symphony Orchestra is presenting a weekend of “total immersion” – a chance to plunge into Rihm’s ever-changing musical world, with string quartets from the Arditti Quartet, major ensemble pieces from the London Sinfonietta, and a concert performance of his intense one-act opera, Das Gehege, in the evening performance on Saturday.
“My music is always different to what you think it is,” Rihm says, cryptically.
But I find clues to this kaleidoscopic musical world. Rihm is a musical omnivore. He joyfully shows me how he’s just discovered that Schoenberg was experimenting with the theme of Elgar’s Enigma Variations towards the end of his life – probably the most unlikely connection between two composers in music history. Rihm was inspired to dive into all the Elgar he could get his hands on, and it’s a surprise when one of Germany’s greatest living modernists sings me a tune from Elgar’s tone-poem In the South and tells me, “You can learn so much from his orchestration.”
Sibelius is another deep love of Rihm’s – “I always have the score of the Fourth Symphony in my pocket” – and the CDs on his piano reveal his recent explorations: Miles Davis, Sweelinck’s keyboard works, Stockhausen, Elliott Carter.
Rihm embraces all of his enthusiasms with total intensity and dedication, and he is open to inspiration wherever it comes from. The way he composes, dynamically and organically, is the same.”You play with some ideas as a composer, you want them to show you something. It’s a technical experimentation with different forms, but then something happens, and the music starts to play with me. And then I play with it again. It’s like a love relationship, or a form of sex – in the best sense.”
Whatever Rihm’s music sounds like on the surface – and the pieces being played in London contain everything from expressionistic violence to deeply felt serenity – it’s driven by an energy, a life-force, that’s as generous and as powerful as the personality of the man who wrote it.
As I leave, Rihm gives me a present of 30 CDs of his music – just a fraction of his output. I haven’t listened to it all yet. But I will: it’s a lifelong project, getting to know Rihm’s music, but it’s one you can’t stop once you’ve started. This music has a life-affirming spirit that’s addictive, positive, and intoxicating. Rather like that 1982 Glenfarclas, come to think of it.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/mar/04/wolfgang-rihm-interview