“My music saves me”
Wolfgang Rihm in conversation

Wolfgang Rihm (1952-2024) was famous – more famous than most contemporary composers can ever aspire to becoming. The Berliner Philharmoniker appointed him as their Composer in Residence for the 2024/25 season. Following Wolfgang Rihm’s death on 27 July 2024, the planned concerts will now take place “in memoriam”. For this interview, conducted in March of 2024, he spoke about inspiration, about the struggle to complete a work and about beauty in modern music.

Herr Rihm, where does your music come from? Or, to put it another way, what does inspiration mean in your own particular case?

Music arises as a response to music, as a response to the world. It arises as part of the act of establishing a relationship between one’s own world and another world, which is the world of existence. There is nothing conceptual about this statement: it implies something entirely natural, something that has developed inside me, something as natural as breathing. In short, it is an organic process.

The world to which you are responding is itself often an artistic world: the world of music, art and literature. What does a work have to be like before it can trigger something within you?

It should not be something that has become part of a norm.  Instead, it must be a subjective, individual statement. It shouldn’t express some superior attitude, but rather the individuality of the creative artist. That’s all there is to it. It isn’t a question of dissecting a work and extracting its original message. This message is just the beginning.

So you don’t simply lay bare your source of inspiration. With you, it becomes something quintessentially your own.

I hope so. Others will have to decide whether or not I have been successful.

Which composers inspire you? Are there directions or developments in music that you can count on to provide motivation?

I wouldn’t say that. It’s more about chance encounters, momentary impressions, seeds that grow, impulses that trigger something else. I can’t be more specific.

Do you also feel the same with jazz and with rock or pop music?

I don’t go to a concert to hear a particular trend in music. I always try to understand what I’m hearing in terms of its own unique qualities and substance. What I encounter there may be a complete flop or it could be heavy going.

But you must be able to sense in advance that something might be a flop.

I certainly don’t go out of my way to suffer through popular music performances just so that I can learn to love them.

Once you have found your inspiration and you start to compose, what do you then need above all else? A furious urge to write? Or self-control?

Both. There is nothing that needs self-control more than the furious urge to compose, if it is to be properly activated. There must be something of both qualities in order for one to work oneself up into the required state. Also, it’s not as if the moment of inspiration comes first, followed by a period of implementation. The one flows into the other. It’s often only when I’m doing something that I notice that there may have been a moment of inspiration.

How do you structure your ideas so that they produce a work of music? Is this a relatively orderly process? Or is it, rather, spontaneous?

The work structures itself, and I have to be sensitive enough to respond on a seismographic level to its independent motion. Form arises on the basis of my own particular feeling – my feeling for form. In this way, ratios of power and masses and textures react to one another. If I change something here, then something else happens elsewhere. This means that you always have to keep your ears open and to be flexible enough to accept whatever comes at you. Then you have to make a choice. It’s not a case of being submissive to whatever happens; it’s more about tending it like a gardener.

So it’s not so much about having a master plan as it is about having a willingness to work on the details?

The most important decisions on a formal level are not the large-scale or grand choices, but rather those on the smallest scale. How does something follow on from what’s gone before? Should it be slightly unstable? Or should it be direct? It is ultimately these moments of fuzziness that turn the notes on the page into a musical experience with its own meaning.

This organic growth of the work’s form is also something that you can experience when listening to the piece. Your music often unfolds like a novel. Is that your intention?

On the one hand it’s intentional, but on the other there’s nothing else that I can do. At school we used to be told to work out the structure before we wrote an essay in German. I always began by writing the essay, and I would only impose a structure on it later. The structure was always the right one for the essay.

If you write music in this way, how do you know when the piece is finished?

Instinctively. Sometimes it’s a big struggle. The working process is bearable. It’s your salvation. Beginning and ending a work is the hard part.

Do you ever get the feeling that there’s nothing more you can add to a piece?

Sometimes. Other alternatives include the ability to rely entirely on chance, to suddenly leave things open-ended, to break off and to consciously end the piece and lock it away for safekeeping. There are various gestures associated with ending a work, and in each case I have to sense which one of them is the right one. Sometimes it means playing with constellations of sounds or colours. And then I know straight away that it’s time to stop. I've got it!

Do you often feel this when composing? Seizing the fleeting thought?

Sometimes – the thought that proves to be your salvation.

But you can’t provoke it. Either it comes or it doesn’t.

That’s how it is. It’s a blessed injustice.

In an emergency earlier composers could fall back on the sort of norms that stipulated how a symphony should end. These norms no longer exist. As a contemporary composer you’re completely free. Have you ever found this freedom worrying?

There’s always something worrying about freedom when you have to try and shape it. Simply to enjoy it is good, but in art you always have to achieve something, to fashion and shape it, although I’m talking about things that are simply not possible for me to do at present. At the moment I’m no longer a part of my profession; I am looking at it from the outside. Nominally I’m still a composer, but I’ve produced nothing for a year and a half.

You’ve been ill.

I had cancer, a sarcoma on my upper thigh that had metastasized and robbed me of my physical strength, which I need as a composer. To write music you not only need an alert mind but also a robust body. When you’re composing you place enormous demands on your body; certainly the way that I write music does. It’s no longer possible for me to sit for hours and weeks at a time and write. I have to wait until something else opens up for me.

You’ve been writing music since you were a child. You’ve never known any other way of life.

No, I haven’t. This is a new state. It’s very interesting.

Is it bearable?

Yes, because there’s a body of work, and not just unrealized intentions. Of course, there are lots of open endings with me, works that I’ve begun but not pursued. But there are others that I’ve completed, works that are finished, works that are filled with life. Somehow, this saves me in my current situation.

If you now have ideas that would otherwise have been used in your music, can you just let them pass?

Yes. They lead nowhere. But this shouldn’t be seen as in any way tragic. This whole situation means a completely new perspective on things, especially on artistic matters. I can’t say that I’m not more relaxed.

But that’s good.

Of course, it’s good. Perhaps this is what we all need to learn.

You mentioned the importance of your body of work. What about the way in which the general public – other people – perceive your work. Is this something that’s important to you?

Of course. My work is directed at others. Not at any particular group of people, but at the possibility inherent in the word “human”.

Do you ever ask yourself if your music reaches only the experienced listener? Have you tried to lead people to contemporary music – or even to seduce them with it?

In that case, I’d be offering them a product and peddling my wares from door to door like a hawker. “Here, take this! It will do you good.” What are experienced listeners? They are listeners who might be able to experience something themselves, who could relate some experience or other to themselves, and who learn something that they did not know before. Without such experiences, not even art from a much earlier period will be able to reach them. Art is always a challenge. Listeners who have had experience of older art are just as valuable in my eyes. Because now they are sensitive enough to be able to experience new art.

This type of listener often seems to exist. Your music is performed a lot, more than that of any other German composer. So it must be particularly accessible.

But this “accessibility” hasn’t arisen on the basis of a questionnaire. My music reaches people because I reveal myself to them as someone who is defenceless, someone who has always opened himself up, unprotected, to the processes of a work’s reception.

It wasn’t your goal to be a much-performed composer?

As a young composer, I definitely wanted to be heard. And this is no less true of me now that I’m older.

Let’s talk about the young Wolfgang Rihm. In 1974, a performance of Morphonie in Donaueschingen attracted a lot of attention, but because you used a traditional line-up of instruments, the work wasn’t regarded as avant-garde. Did this upset you?

You can’t control the way in which people react to your music. At one concert there may be subscribers who find it all terrible, and at another there may be supporters of the avant-garde who likewise find it all terrible. At the next concert there may be a mixture of subscribers and supporters of the avant-garde who still find it all terrible. And people may already be prejudiced: what’s he trying to achieve? That young whippersnapper! I’ve experienced this first-hand.

So your impact had a lot to do with your age?

It was because of my age but also because of my attitude. I wrote music for which I never apologized. “Oh, I’m sorry, unfortunately it’s turned out to be beautiful. Oh, I’m sorry, unfortunately it’s turned out to be hideous.” I entrusted the music to the frenzy of existing categories and waited to see what happened.

What was your approach to twelve-note music? To align yourself with it back then was seen as proof what you were writing music in the here and now.

I learnt all of this from my teacher Eugen Werner Velte through my composition exercises. As a result, I was only seventeen when I wrote a twelve-tone symphony.

Although one can’t necessarily hear this because this music is so expressive.

Of course. A piece can be tonal and as cold as ice – and then again it can be very hot. But this doesn’t mean a thing. For many people, these techniques are proof of their identity as contemporaries. But in fact they merely contribute to the growth of something that is meant to be. This is often forgotten.

Are you a loner?

Yes.

Why?

Because I’d be no good as a standard-bearer. I’m not someone who collects a troupe of followers. I’ve always been a a private person, and I have always been able to make decisions based on my own intuition.

Has this ever harmed you?

There have undoubtedly been situations where my idea of authorship came as a surprise. But for an artist there can be nothing better than not being predictable.

There’s another area in which you’ve stood out from the people around you. The seventies were a highly political time. Composers who were close to you and who included Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono championed revolution. You didn’t do that.

No.

What did it feel like to be seen as a relatively unpolitical composer?

Even the phrase “political composer” struck me as a contradiction in terms but also as a tautology. One is always political when one makes an artistic statement and addresses the general public. And I was happy, of course, that my music couldn’t be used to shore up any Fascist ideologies.

Do you think it’s more important to write human music than political music?

What is “human music”? The whole of music is always profoundly “human”. Without humans, there would be no music. There’s music that pretends that it’s not human – either it pretends to be in possession of higher moral values or it pretends to have fallen to earth from some star or other. These are all attempts to replace a lack of responsibility. Music is entirely human, archetypally human.

What is your attitude to beauty in contemporary music? In specialist circles this is often regarded as suspect, after all.

What do you understand by “beauty”?

Montezuma’s cantilenas in your opera The Conquest of Mexico, for example, reflect my idea of beauty.

Mine too. But I didn’t write them to reflect a sense of beauty.

So you’re not trying to write beautiful music?

I’m not trying to write ugly music, either. Perhaps I’m not striving to write music at all, but simply seeking a stance towards things, a state of openness.

And if people react by feeling that something is beautiful, this happens without any prompting on your part?

Yes; there’s also an uncontrolled aspect to beauty. Very good.

It’s often possible to detect passages in your music in which beauty gives way to something far more disturbing. It’s the same with Schubert, where we are abruptly plunged into the abyss after the heady levity of a folk-song.

This is undoubtedly an attitude to which I can relate as a human being, and which right I think about from time to time.

Is this then a comment on the universally human? On life in general? 

Beauty is a part of our lives, but so is the end of beauty, the moment when it all collapses. Everything ends. In the case of beauty, above all, it is a reflected ending that is integral to it. What is it that constitutes beauty? That it may one day cease to exist. This leaves us feeling sad.

How much of you as a human being is contained in your music?

All of me, I think. Including my anxieties, my fear and also, of course, my euphoria. But I don’t want to burden my music by attaching these labels to it.

Then let’s say something about you and the Berliner Philharmoniker. This is an association that has lasted many years. Can you still remember the orchestra performing one of your works in 1977? It was Lichtzwang, conducted by Hans Werner Henze.

I can still remember it very well. I also remember the concertmaster, Leo Spierer, who had to play the violin solo with a contact microphone because there were passages in which the orchestral textures were too dense and too loud and too active, so that the solo violin had difficulty making itself heard. But the contact microphone fell off and I thought: Next time you write this kind of music, you’ll do a better job of it!

What other impressions have you retained of your work with the Berliner Philharmoniker?

I can still clearly recall my conversations with the intendant, Wolfgang Stresemann, who was a kind of mentor to me and who programmed my Second Symphony under Václav Neumann. He also facilitated the world premiere of my Third Symphony, which lasts over an hour, so it was the only work on the programme.

And these were followed by many other works. How do you explain your long association with the Berliner Philharmoniker?

It has always had to do with human beings. Claudio Abbado was undoubtedly very important. He had a bit of a soft spot for my music and regularly included my works in his programmes.

And your relations with the orchestra?

There have been ties with individual members. An orchestra isn’t a uniform mass. There have always been people with whom I’ve had a good relationship because they’ve recognized that my music contains something that they can relate to their own ideas about art. But there has also been a lot of rejection.

What was the reason for this?

The same thing. The things that attracted some people – a certain energy, a certain intuition – caused fear in others.

But within the context of contemporary music, you and your sound world are very close to that of the Berliner Philharmoniker.

I think so, too. But when I was still in my mid-twenties, not many people saw that. There was a lot of resistance to the world premiere of my Third Symphony.

This has changed. During the 2024/25 season, you’re the orchestra’s composer in residence. Your music is a constant presence all season. In this way a particular narrative has come full circle.

Yes, something is being carried forward.

Today, when you look back on your overall output, which is made up of five or six hundred works, can you identify structures that were not yet discernible when you were working on the individual pieces? Or is your overall body of work lacking in any order?

Time and again, the body of work establishes points of reference. With much that I do I return to works that I wrote in the past, but with others I look to the future. I incorporate one element, abandon another, confront it with something new. This is not so much a matter of quoting myself; it’s more that it represents an encounter with myself, resulting in a multilayered form that has something geological about it.

You’ve produced this vast body of work. Many of your pieces have found their way into the repertory. You could feel contented. Or is contentment something inartistic?

I’m contented. But in a discontented way.

This conversation took place in Wolfgang Rihm’s apartment in Karlsruhe in March 2024.