Obituary, Wolfgang Rihm (1957-2024)

The prolific, eclectic composer Wolfgang Rihm has died in Ettlingen aged 72. With a legacy of over 500 works, Rihm was one of the most frequently-performed contemporary European composers – and sprung surprises at every turn throughout his fifty-year career, refusing to align himself with any particular compositional school or sound-world.

Born on 13th March 1952 in Karlsruhe (which remained his home for the rest of his life), Rihm showed an interest in composition from a young age and graduated from the Hochschule für Musik in his hometown before studying with Stockhausen in Cologne and Klaus Huber in Freiburg.

Early successes included Morphonie for orchestra and quartet (premiered at the Donaueschingen Festival in 1974), the 1977 chamber opera Jakob Lenz, and the larger-scale opera Die Hamletmaschine; based on Heiner Müller’s play after Shakespeare, the latter work was composed in the mid-1980s and premiered in Mannheim, when Die Zeit enthused that ‘everything is constantly new, exciting, exhausting and rewarding’. Two more stage works followed soon afterwards: the Sophocles-inspired music drama Oedipus and the four-act opera Die Eroberung von Mexico ('The Conquest of Mexico'), which was first staged in Hamburg in 1991.

Rihm’s enormous body of work included thirteen string quartets, three symphonies, four violin concertos, the trumpet concerto Marsyas, the sequence of powerful chamber miniatures Chiffre-Zyklus, the passion Deus Passus, Et Lux for vocal quartet and string quartet, and a large number of song-cycles (both for voice & piano and voice & orchestra).

Rihm devoted a considerable amount of energy to teaching, returning to his alma mater in 1985 and holding a professorship there until near the end of his life; his students included Jörg Widmann, Rebecca Saunders, and Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini. The visual arts and literature were lifelong passions: he enjoyed a close friendship with the Austrian artist Kurt Kocherscheidt (to whom he dedicated his third violin concerto Dritte Musik), and he set a wide range of German poets including Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich Heine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Rückert.

Rihm was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, but continued to teach and compose whilst undergoing treatment: his late works include a concerto for the cellist Sol Gabetta (premiered in Geneva in 2020), the Requiem-Strophen, Gebet der Hexe von Endor (‘The Prayer of the Witch of Endor’), and Terzinen an den Tod (written for the baritone Georg Nigl, a great champion of his vocal music).

Rihm’s many awards and honours included a Royal Philharmonic Society Award (for the concerto grosso Jagden und Formen) in 2001, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the Robert Schumann Prize for Music and Poetry, and an honorary doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin. He is survived by his third wife Verena, and two children from previous marriages.

Wolfgang Rihm - a selected discography