»The work turns out as it wants to«

Interview: Tom R. Schulz, October 2022

At home with Wolfgang Rihm (1952–2024) on an October morning in Karlsruhe, who was one of the most important composers of the recent decades.

Mr Rihm, quite a few performances of your works have taken place in Hamburg, such as the operas »Jakob Lenz« and »Die Eroberung von Mexiko« (The Conquest of Mexico«). What memories of Hamburg do you have?

Good ones, without exception. I always enjoyed spending time there. The city invited me to take part in the programme »Artists visit Hamburg« in 1979, and I had a lovely apartment behind the Hotel Atlantic, on the corner of Holzdamm with a view of the Alster. If my memory doesn’t deceive me, the Alster was frozen and I walked out over the ice.

You have often said that you prefer talking about the process of composition to talking about the works themselves.

It’s a bad habit, this need to always discuss things. Why can’t people just accept that music is a non-verbal form of expression and leave it at that? Music is an utterance that can certainly resemble language, but not in the sense of a spoken text featuring grammar rules and so on. Music is a different form of articulation, and we should just leave it untouched.

But isn’t that partly your fault, because you’re so good with words? Some composers don’t like talking.

I am actually one of them, but apparently I do so in a way that’s easily understood. (Laughs) I really don’t like talking about music at all. Music is not a medium that works on the level of direct verbal exchange, where one person communicates content to another. Music is different. It’s a medium where emotional content is communicated between individuals, but not by verbalising it.

Arnold Schönberg once said that music is the language of things that can only be said in notes.

That’s a beautiful and accurate way of putting it. And the older I get, the more impossible it becomes. You produce something, and then people expect you to comment on it, as if they mistrust the music itself.

When you are writing something for a particular interpreter, do you think of the musician who will be playing it?

I certainly sometimes take the artist’s abilities into consideration, but that doesn’t make any essential contribution to the music itself. The piece turns out as it turns out. The work turns out as it wants to.

The German writer Kleist once referred to the »gradual production of ideas while speaking«. Is composing a similar process for you?

Definitely. When I start working, I don’t know much at all. I get to know the piece as I write it: it gradually reveals itself to me. It then depends on my ability to turn it into a score than can be performed. But now I’m talking about things that don’t apply to me at the moment. I am too weak to work. I used to be able to sit down and compose for as long as 15 hours, then I got up and did something else. I can’t do that any more, not since I contracted cancer. My main priority now is to persevere, to keep on going for months, maybe even years. To not give up.

Are you managing to compose at all at the moment?

Very little indeed. It’s not for lack of ideas: the problem is to put them down on paper. It’s immensely hard to keep going and to cope with the hostility that the work itself confronts you with.

Doesn’t it make you livid that you can’t just let everything out?

Yes it does. It makes me sad on the one hand, and on the other I feel embarrassed: I feel like a con man. I constantly claim that I do something, but I don’t actually produce anything at all.

But surely there’s nothing left for you to prove.

That’s true, I realise that. It’s more a question of the tasks I set myself. Everything that I try to write reveals an old wish that dates back to my childhood. I believe that most things of artistic relevance stem from obsessions, from deeper layers that we don’t have access to. And these thing emerge in our work: emotions, inner turbulence and movements. I can’t express them, but I know that I have them, and that they can produce a great deal.

You once said that you are actually writing one big work.

It’s as if I had one huge block of music inside me, and I keep on cutting off one small piece from the whole. You hammer away at it, knocking and scratching it. Who knows, maybe these were feelings that I transferred on to the physical level; maybe I had a huge tumor in my upper thigh!

The poetess Ilse Aichinger once wrote that »Nothing need endure«.

That’s true, there is really nothing that needs to endure. I’m happy that I have never been fashionable, that I’ve never had to stand for a particular type of articulation that was »in«. I’ve always been a bit suspicious, and I like it that way. (Laughs.)