The composer Wolfgang Rihm, who has died aged 72 of cancer, epitomised many of the challenges faced by German composers of his generation. Older figures, most famously Karlheinz Stockhausen, had addressed the problem of the nation’s Nazi heritage by attempting to start again from scratch (the position often called Stunde Null). In contrast, many younger composers, such as Rihm, felt an obligation to reincorporate aspects of the musical past: an aim that led some to be stifled in their creativity.
Rihm, though, was from an early age, not only confident about his own compositional voice, but also able to sustain an abundant output. By the time of his death, he had written more than 500 works; a documentary film about his efforts to continue composing despite illness (he had been diagnosed with cancer in 2017) was made in 2020.
Rihm first came to wide attention when his work for string quartet and orchestra, Morphonie, was premiered at the Donaueschingen festival in 1974.
While Stockhausen had developed methods of writing serial music inspired by the example of Anton Webern, his younger compatriot’s musical language – tonally orientated and emotionally direct – drew on the legacy of Gustav Mahler, the early works of Arnold Schoenberg and, more generally, expressionism.
Morphonie was branded by one critic as “indecently individual”. Aged just 22, Rihm found himself a hated new figurehead for an emerging German “bratpack” keen to establish different ways of doing things – and to find an audience that went beyond the cognoscenti for Neue Musik.
Such an image, caricatured as postmodernist or merely retrogressive, was to dog Rihm throughout his life; he was labelled variously as a representative of the “new simplicity”, the “new subjectivity” or “neo-expressionism”. His own accounts of his intentions were rather more complicated.
The action of Die Hamletmaschine (The Hamlet Machine, 1987), for instance – an opera based on Heiner Müller’s play of the same name – takes place, as Rihm put it, “in front of the ‘ruins of Europe’ whose dust is still the best nourishment for anyone who wants to confront things or wants to know where we came from”.
This apparent obsession with the past, however, was seemingly contradicted by his insistence that “Freedom must be seized ... The connecting potential of music is enormous and often a bother for me, since I would like to break out of general contexts.”
An enduring feature of Rihm’s output was his enthusiasm for using pre-existing musical material in subsequent compositions. Jagden und Formen (Hunts and Forms), one of his most frequently played pieces, exists in multiple versions, each a reworking of the previous one; begun in 1995, it was only completed in 2008. The various reworkings of Vers une Symphonie Fleuve (Towards a River Symphony, 1992-2009) similarly assemble what theorists would term a kind of intertextual, multireferential palimpsest. “The ‘symphony’ as such,” its composer said, “never arrives!”
The torrent of titles that constitutes his catalogue includes at least nine operas or music-theatre compositions, one of which – Jakob Lenz (1978), based on the novel by Georg Büchner – has been widely seen, including in Britain, where it was staged at the Almeida festival in 1987 and in an ENO production at Hampstead theatre in 2012. Live performances of his works in the UK have usually been, at best, fitful, although these included a Total Immersion weekend presented by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in 2010.
Rihm was born in Karlsruhe, south-west Germany, to Julius, an executive for the Red Cross, and his wife, Margarete. He studied composition with Eugen Werner Velte at the city’s University of Music, and with Stockhausen in Cologne and Klaus Huber in Freiburg. He wrote his first symphony at 17.
Remaining in Karlsruhe for much of his life, he himself became a professor of composition at the University of Music in 1985, where his students included Rebecca Saunders and Jörg Widmann (who recently characterised Rihm as “sometimes manic obsessive and always extreme”). Among many awards, he received the Ernst von Siemens Music prize in 2003 and the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in music at the Venice Biennale in 2010.
Rihm is survived by his third wife, Verena Weber, whom he married in 2017; a son, Sebastian, from his first marriage, to Johanna Feldhausen, which ended in divorce; a daughter, Katja, from his second, to Uta Frank, who died in 2013; and his sister Monika.
• Wolfgang Rihm, composer and teacher, born 13 March 1952; died 27 July 2024
