WOLFGANG RIHM Of all the composers of the post-war generation - i. e. those referred to more properly as composers of the "Federal Re- public" rather than simply "Germany" - the best known is Wolfgang Rihm. Born in 1952 in Karlsruhe, he owes this distinction not only to his astonishing productivity, with work following upon work in rapid succession, but also to the fortunate circumstance that these works were earlv, Der- formed in important places. If a single date day be used to mark the meteoric rise of his career it would be the 1974 Donaueschingen Festival, where his orchestral work "Mor- phonie" - intended to be the keystone of a seven-piece cycle for orchestra - received its premikre performance. This work was viewed in Donaueschingen as a plea for a turn, or rather a return, to the large orchestra and the symphonic vein, a plea which consequently led to a revival of the symphony as a genre, not least of all thanks to Rihm's own work. By this time, Rihm had already published solo and cham- ber pieces with Breitkopf in Wiesbaden and had largely completed his education. His training had begun with Eugen Werner Velte in Karlsruhe, where he took his degree in 1972, and continued privately with Wolfgang Fortner, briefly with Karlheinz Stockhausen, and finally from 1973 with Sub-Kontur Klaus Huber in Freiburg-in-Breisgau. In the wake of his subsequent oeuvre, now published by Universal Edition in Vienna and numbering some 10 works, Rihm began with re- This work, written in winter 1974-y on a commission from markable success to explore the stage in two chamber operas, the Sudwestfunk in Baden-Baden and dedicated to Karlheinz "Faust und Yorick" (1976) and "Jakob Lenz" (19774, and Stockhausen, was Rihm's second piece to be premikred in Do- a ballet "Tutuguri" after Antonin Artaud (1981-2). naueschingen, with Ernest Bour conducting the Sudwestfunk "Music deals with atavistic drives." (Zur "Neuen Einfach- Symphony Orchestra (1976). It was originally meant to form heit" in der Musik, ed. 0. Kolleritsch, Vienna and Graz, 198 I, an orchestral triptych with "Dis-Kontur" - an earlier work p. 81) This remark, which avoids a definition of the type for large orchestra written in 1974 and given a first hearing "music is . .", is perhaps characteristic of the younger gene- under Michael Gielen in Stuttgart in October 1971 - and an ration of composers as a whole; at all events it applies to unspecified third "-Kontur". Whether as part of a cycle or Rihm. Rihm regards definable concepts as restrictions, and on its own, "Sub-Kontur" bears the unmistakable and con- distrusts them iust as he sourns and bristles at anv labels and scious im~rintof the Adagio- movement., a -genre to which classifications for music. He even rejects the catchword Rihm has devoted special attention in his subsequent sym- "New Simplicity" frequently applied to him, even though ~honies.indeed in his work as a whole. This ~ieceof half an the atavistic dimension obviously hints at something primi-. hour connects directly with the mighty ~dasosof Bruckner tive and hence at an ideal of sim~licitv.A,Yet the "atavistic and Mahler., A~articularlv their late ones: it seeks and finds drives" mentioned by Rihm and conjured in his music have expressive refuge in Mahler, and has ultimately come to not been marshalled for purposes of simplicity, still less of betoken the "Mahler renaissance" which was in full swav in regression. On the contrary, they are meant to generate an the early 1970s. emotional complexity for which Rihm demands utmost clar- Two striking features underscore the Adagio quality and ity of presentation. give the piece its distinctive flavour. First, apart from three This attempt to plumb the depths of the human soul by contrabassoons, the scoring dispenses entirely with wood- means of composition, to give them audible form and at winds. This greatly limits the ensemble potential of the treble times to force them to the surface bv ex~ressionisticmeans. instruments, represented here basically by the violins and , L is directed not least against the serialist manner of the pre- trumpets, as compared to the extremely rich scoring for bass ceding generation. Since time immemorial artists have exer- instruments; Rihm himself, in his notes for the premilre, cised a right to condemn the immediate past as obsolete and speaks of a "crushing, squeezing preponderance of the bass". superseded; here this right joins forces with the accusation (Programmheft der Donaueschinger Musiktage 1976) Sec- that serial techniques are mathematically contrived, with ond, the ear - and in performance the eye - immediately "rationality" and "intellectualism" - not for the first time in notices four bass drums whose "thunderous rolls" and rum- music history - being the words that cause tempers to fly. bles begin and end the piece. The extreme concentration in serial music on constructive The opening drum roll is elementary in a dual sense. For relations is perceived as superficial manipulation which can- one, lacking substance, it serves to construct the rhythmic not hope to do justice to, indeed which can even obstruct, the element of the piece: "This roll, unstable when taken by "inner life", of the sounds. Instead, a cry has gone up for a itself, turns into the rhythm component of the adagio prose" fresh, one might even say "destructive" approach. Just as in (ibid.) Secondly, the four bass drums clearly stress the ele- the French poststructuralism of Foucault and Deleuze, post- ment of timbre, here present in one of its most elementary serial music of Rihm's sort demands a highly ramified, rhlzo- forms - namely as unpitched noise which has yet to become morphous, free-associative brand of thinking. This is just the pitch and sound. (The violent hammerstrokes that open "Dis- opposite of "pure music", which is expunged of all conven- Kontur" serve a similar function.) This return, as it were, tional acoustical events. For Rihm. this "~uritv"exists onlv to a re-musical, elemental acoustic state - an "inchoate" . d in the deficient realm of the antiseptic, vacuum-packed and state jnto which '~ihmby no means discretly but brutally hermetically sealed. The image of the composer has changed flings the listener - intimates that the "adagio prose" which from an architect to a "creature of passion" (cf. W. Rihm: he has used to formulate his thoughts has nothling of its "Der geschockte Komponist", in: Darmstadter Beitrage zur customary dignity and nobility. On the contrary, it gains Neuen Musik, XVII, Mainz, 1978, p. 41), the notion of melodic and timbral contour from its acoustic "attacks" and "pure" music to "im~ure".It is no lonzer mathematics and interjections, whose models in nature - the thunderclap and technology that pide composers but ~ychology,a change the scream - here reverberate in art. which might well be a hallmark of composition in the 1970s. As in few other forms, the large-scale, grand Adagio lends Composers like Rihm are motivated by an "urge towards itself to, even virtually provokes, the musical representation liberation" (the phrase was coined by Busoni, a composer of sublimity. But Rihm's objective in "Sub-Kontur" is not to Rihm admires, in reference to Beethoven), causing them to visualize this type of sublimity which, by overpowering the bare their souls in fearless disregard for brazenness or self- listener, puts him into a state of euphoria and transforms torment. Its end is insanity - the mainspring of any art which itself into a ~leasurableand comfortable sensation in the admits the absurd. This is the main theme not only of Rihm's process. Rather, he illuminates those dimensions of sublimity stage works but also of his "Wolfli-Lieder" of 1981-2, to which still retain their ties to suffering" and terror. and in poems by Adolf Wolfli, a schizophrenic held in high regard whose overpowering effect the element of violence can still in recent years. Unlike writers, the stricken mind and its be discerned. Rihm's music reeisters" not merelv the disso- modes of expression have been little explored by musicians, nance inherent to 20th-century music (Adorno called disso- the "Symphonie fantastique" notwithstanding. It would seem nance the "fingerprint of modernity", T. W. Adorno: Ksthe- that Rihm is deeply and deliberately involved in this subject. tische Theorie, Schriften, vii, Frankfurt-on-Main, 1970, p. 29) but also terror itself. In this respect, his aesthetic stance bears the full brunt, in musical terms, of the movement initiated above all by Charles Baudelaire. Rihm's claim that music deals with "atavistic drivesu finds its confirmation in "Sub-Kontur", and it is no coincidence that even in later works, such as the concluding portion of "Tutuguriu, Rihm again turned to the bass drum and its heavy burden of symbolism. "Sub-Kontur" is a relatively early work; yet, for all the sophistication and changes in Rihm's later musical idiom, it well bears out the programma- tic traits which its author outlined as follows: "'Sub-Kontur' is a piece of music which makes no excuses for the mud it drags in on its shoes. 'Impure' music which, at once orderly and entropic, can turn into wanton agony, full of desire in its aversion to grey, clinical propriety and the stifling arbitrariness of norms, the music that will sur- round us once we become certain of our own certainly." (Programmheft der Donaueschinger Musiktage 1976, cf. also W. Frobenius: Die "Neue Einfachheit" und der biirgerliche Sch6nheitsbegriff, Zur "Neuen Einfachheit" in der Musik, op. cit., p. 19, with an analysis of "Sub-Kontur") The recording of "Sub-Kontur" presented here is taken from the disc SWF 54 of the Siidwestfunk, Baden-Baden, conducted by Ernest Bour. In several passages there are dis- crepancies with the printed score, Universal Edition I 662 I.