Wolfgang Rihm

Wolfgang Rihm was a German composer and teacher. He was born on March 13, 1952, in Karlsruhe, West Germany, and died on July 27, 2024, in Ettlingen, near Karlsruhe, Germany.

He studied at the Bismarck Gymnasium in Karlsruhe and in Darmstadt, then with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne from 1972 to 1973. From 1973 to 1976 he studied in Freiburg with Klaus Huber in composition and with Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht in music theory. He later headed the Institute for Contemporary Music at the Karlsruhe University of Music.

Rihm’s music grew out of early Expressionism, especially Mahler and Schoenberg, and stood in opposition to the avant-gardism associated with Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In the 1970s and early 1980s he was one of the representatives of the “New Simplicity.” During that period he was influenced by Luigi Nono, Morton Feldman, and Helmut Lachenmann.

His output included 13 string quartets and a large body of stage, vocal, and orchestral works. Among his operas are Faust and Yorick (1976), based on the play by Jean Tardieu; Jakob Lenz (1978), after Georg Büchner; Oedipus (1987), with a libretto by the composer based on texts by Sophocles, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heiner Müller; The Conquest of Mexico (1992), after Artaud; Hamletmachine (1983–1986), after Heiner Müller; Penthesilea (2005), after Kleist; and Dionysus (2010). He also wrote about twenty song cycles, the oratorio Deus Passus (1996), and many other compositions.

As a teacher, Rihm trained numerous students, among them Rebecca Saunders, Jörg Widmann, Márton Illés, Vykintas Baltakas, Boris Yoffe, Anton Safronov, and Zeynep Gedizlioglu.

His achievements were recognized with many honors, including prizes from Stuttgart (1974), Mannheim (1975), Berlin (1978), Bonn, and Munich (1981), as well as the Kranichstein Music Prize (1978). He became an honorary doctor of the Free University of Berlin in 1998, received the Bach Prize in Hamburg in 2000, was made an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2001, won the Ernst von Siemens Prize in 2003, was entered into the Golden Book of the city of Karlsruhe in 2003, and received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2011.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.