Yesterday afternoon I learned, through my New York Times feed, of the death of composer Wolfgang Rihm at the age of 72. Given that I am now in my late seventies, this was a bit of a shock; but it was just as much of a shock when I realized how long it has been since I have listened to this composer’s music. Equally disconcerting as that all of those encounters have been through recordings.
Wolfgang Rihm addressing an audience at the Kölner Philharmonie in June of 2007 (photograph by Hans Peter Schaefer, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, from a Wikimedia Web page)
Indeed, Rihm’s presence on this site has been little more than incidental. However, during my tenure with Examiner.com, I wrote five articles about recordings of his music between January of 2012 and May of 2013. My “first contact” with him was a Musikproduktion Dabringhaus und Grimm (MDG) CD with the slightly deceptive title Music for Violin and Piano. The “deception” was that roughly half of the disc was the solo piano composition “Nachstudie,” played by Steffen Schleiermacher. Violinist Andreas Seidel joined Schleiermacher for the “before” and “after” selections, “Antlitz” and “Phantom und Eskapede.” My account of this album cited the influence of Morton Feldman, and it was that influence that “hooked” me into following up on subsequent releases of four further albums.
Nevertheless, after reading the Times obituary, I realized that the recordings in my collection constituted a disappointingly narrow account of Rihm’s creativity. Even more disappointing has been the paucity of opportunities (if there have been any at all) to listen to his music in performance here in San Francisco. The fact is that, over the course of his career, Rihm made a major mark on music history; and it would be more than unfortunate if that mark were confined to the boundaries of Germany. However, because I have no influence on “the powers that be,” the best I can do is encourage readers to do an Amazon search on Rihm’s name to check out what they have been missing.
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