German composer Wolfgang Rihm, who wrote music of wide-ranging style and emotional complexity over half a century, is dead at age 72.
Rihm, born in Karlsruhe, West Germany, in 1952, wrote more than 500 compositions over his lifetime ranging from atonal modernism to “New Simplicity” to utterly uncategorizable. Major works include the experimental, eight-part “Chiffre-Zyklus” (1982–1988) for chamber ensembles; the large-scale and dynamic “Jagden und Formen”; and the more sentimental “Lichtes Spiel” (2010) for violin and orchestra.
“Rihm is a composer who puts a giant question-mark over his doing,” states Rihm’s biography at his publisher for many years, Universal Edition. “Each new work is an answer to the question raised by the previous piece; each new work poses questions which he will seek a reply to in the composition to be written next.”
Rihm was also the recipient of many awards over five decades, including the 2001 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for “Jagden und Formen” and the 2003 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. In 2019 he received the German Music Authors’ Lifetime Achievement Prize. Among his students were major composers Rebecca Saunders and Jörg Widmann.
A 2020 documentary film about Rihm, “The Legacy,” discussed the composer’s battle with cancer for more than two decades. He remained remarkably upbeat and productive despite composing with the illness for a third of his life.
