It's about 70 minutes into German composer Wolfgang Rihm's two-hour "poème dansé" Tutuguri, and I'm becoming increasingly convinced he's mad. As conductor Fabrice Bollon and the SWR-Orchester storm ahead, I wonder if the audience feels similarly: I see incredulity in many faces, veering into either wide-eyed enthusiasm or worried entrapment. Even the sleek space of Paris's Cité de la Musique seems shaken by the score's ceaseless volley of outbursts and silences; they wreak havoc on the acoustics and de-gloss the philharmonic sound. But the music is not attacking us, nor the concert hall. It's clearly out for itself, hunting down its next measures with lethal resolve. The emerging sounds carry a last-resort intensity — unpredictable, dangerous, willing to do anything. At this point, temples throbbing, I remember Rihm's plea in the program note: this music "must come to us — an old wish (of mine) — in a raw state, as itself, naked... It must become a cry."
As I recall this, the raging orchestra hits a sonic peak and snaps. I think I hear an actual cry, and my eyes follow the ripple of heads up to the balcony. What I see confirms a kind of worst fear: a bald man, clad in black and red, his abyss of a mouth releasing a gruesome scream. His bulging eyes seem to stare at us all. What are we supposed to do? Stand? Shout back? At this point, I seriously question Rihm's motives. Why is this music not barbarous? What raises it above the crude, the rough, the merely immature? Rihm's score suddenly seems to have registered my questions, and responds: it breaks itself open one last time, into a cosmos of clanging metal, crackling woodblocks and men's cries. But then everything contracts. In the stunned silence that follows, I hear the screaming man (excellently "played" by Rupert Huber, director of the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart) whimpering like a baby. His vocal chords seem to have failed him, and as he dwindles into nothing, six cymbal-sets rise up at the orchestra's back and clink out a hushed, melancholy applause for this failed breakthrough.
This gesture occurs everywhere in Rihm's output: the music locks into a limit — of speed, or volume, or density, or range — and lunges for it like a sonic jugular. But as soon as it reaches that limit, the limit flips and reverses, or reveals a new distant limit. These perpetual breakthroughs create the music's impossible backbone, rebounding one extreme into another. And they take the listener with them as they go. All expectations are turned wildly around, fast becomes slow, grand and pompous gestures morph into sotto voce inflections; in an instant, you can feel compassion for a music you just feared. In the case of this moment in Tutuguri, compositional alchemy turns violence into vulnerability. An animalistic music of bangs and bursts suddenly begets a music with a self-consciousness, aware of its own anxiety, suffering moments of self-delusion and even embarrassment. In other words, at its most brute and feral point, the music detects its audience, becomes interactive, and seems to ask itself, "Was it right to go here? Should I have gone there? Where do I go now?"
Countless composers ask these questions. But they answer them in the studio,
in music's various scaffoldings of sketch, draft, and revision. The genius of
Rihm's work is that it collapses all these phases into the single onstage
moment. It's a risky strategy, but when it works it produces a music of
incomparable immediacy, a music with a life of its own. Rihm's best pieces carry
a scary, impossible energy. They seem to breath with their own breath, before
the composer and performer add theirs. In this sense, Rihm resembles a kind of
radical latter-day Beethoven, sharing the older composer's brand of
self-searching directness. Sounds seem to write themselves in real time; pieces
become, as Rihm once said, their own "landscape of creation." The German musical
scene recognized this some time ago, and this January Rihm was awarded the
much-coveted Ernst von Siemens music prize. "Rihm's music," the Foundation said
in their statement, "bears witness to a faith in the indestructibility of the
creative individual who can maintain strength and dignity in the face of outside
perils." Could a more Beethovenian image have been cast?
But the Beethovenian mold can't really hold Rihm's actual music, which rebels against any Classical impulses with its terrific irregularity. Form in Rihm's music, the score's path from first to last measure, acquires the unclassifiable as the contours of a violent spill; shape is dictated by kind of creative emergency. A Rihm work does not develop; it survives, as if just un-caged, and goes wherever it can in order to keep going. Pieces don't come across as polished objects d'art. They're more subjects of life, as unfinished and untethered. Bowing to the old adage that "to err is human," Rihm's pieces try to humanize themselves through their enduring errors: "[My works] are individuals with a physiognomy of their own, they have a destiny, they come and go and come again."
What surprises about a work like Tutuguri is how it both obeys and denies its destiny, comes and goes at once. Its contradictions don't cancel each other out; they stay around, transparent and suspended. For instance, the score constantly threatens to descend into the purely barbaric. But the downward spiral gets wise to its patterns of error, and grows an increasingly ironic perspective. And behind the stamped-out coarseness of the gestures, the most refined emotions bloom. Six thrashing timpani find their ruckus countered by a fragile violin harmonic, or undercut by a long, meditative rest; sounds of stunning subtlety and calm look upon the melee from above, always registering the other side of the musical coin. In the process, the score becomes its patient and analyst at once; the two circle each other in mutual fascination, and as you listen on you realize that they might make the perfect human being, if only each knew what the other knew.
There's much complexity in this weird anti-method, but is a different kind of complexity than the one that flourished in the music of Wagner, Schoenberg and Boulez, and continued into the European avant-garde of the 1950s and '60s. Like the music of that much-beleaguered tradition, Rihm's artistry also seeks to breathe the air of other planets and proudly stake out terra incognita. It does so, however, not by breaking new ground in technical or systematic extremes, but by probing unexplored territories in the stubbornly unsystematic world of emotions; one might even call it an emotional avant-garde.
And if pitch-logic and rhythmic matrices are the stuff of
specialists, emotion is a more democratic trait. This may be what makes Rihm's
music some of the most generous and accessible coming out of Europe today: it
entangles itself in something every listener already possesses and is possessed
by. And it makes this the spring of its difficulty. "Music must be full of
emotion," the composer once wrote, but added that "emotion [must be] full of
complexity." The audience at the Cité de la Musique, galvanized though they were, seemed pulled by
this complexity. They received Tutuguri not as a closed, monolithic work,
but as an explosively open event. Rihm himself was not master of his own
music, any more than one is master of one's own psyche. The work was its own
embracing presence, surrounding listener and composer alike: "I think that an
audience reacts to a piece only if it emerges from a subjective, very personal
situation and stance, which can be identified as such. Otherwise, the audience
turns off."
This could sound a lot like rehashed Romanticism — not an avant-garde stance at all, but an about-face into nostalgia. Rihm's critics find ample ammunition in his wide stylistic palette, which digs deep and often into the clay of 19th-century German music. And ego is, admittedly, everywhere in Rihm's work. The sweeping gestures, the morbid confessions, the "big sound"; these ubiquitous aspects, combined with Rihm's own profusions of commentary, can occasionally suggest a Lisztian cult of personality.
But Rihm's music is no "language of feeling." His intimacy with the Romantic tradition is an opponent's intimacy. The composer resists that 19th-century penchant to safeguard the emotional world, to make it the furnished salon of the psyche. Rihm's emotional world is perilous and unmasterable. If anything, he inverts Liszt's infamous formula that music "embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought..." Feeling always contends with thought in Rihm's scores, with an almost neurological precision. Neither term wins out; instead, they collide, confuse and astonish each other, like two chess-players making their moves with the same set of pieces.
This tension transfigures even Rihm's most Romantic-sounding scores. An early piece like the 1976 orchestral work Sub-Kontur, for instance, mires itself in the world of the Mahler-Bruckner adagio. It resurrects all the old stylistic icons, from rumbling bass-drums and farewell brass chorales to soaring violins and harp glissandos. But Rihm inflicts an unreal pressure on these gestures, which unfold as on a severely warped record. The score unleashes increasingly alien events, emotions with no emotional icons, sounds which yet have no "music." The score begins to flay its psychic skins like a great sonic onion; Mahlerian adagio turns into expressionistic Berg, then fauvist Stravinsky, and eventually a single, screaming trumpet note.
Sub-Kontur is an extremely powerful, unnerving statement in its own right, but it was also a splinter in the eye of the contemporary musical avant-garde. Obliterating all expectations of abstraction, objectivity and progress, the score offered a scathing critique of both Romantic "feeling" music and contemporary "thought" music. As each side tried to repress the other, Rihm's work reminded the intellect that it cannot merely think away great emotions; and it reminded the id that its unthinking passion can easily turn ruinous. In between these sides, Sub-Kontur also revealed a stunningly bare portrait of Rihm himself — a Molotov cocktail of psychological energies, bottling both a bracing love of history and the need to break free of it.
The composer wrote at the premiere that "Sub-Kontur is a piece of music which makes no excuses for the mud it drags in on its shoes." But the piece didn't need to make excuses. The mud it dragged in was long overdue, as a corrective to the avant-garde's oppressive impulses towards self-negation. But the mud was a restorative too — husking the overripe sound of a fin-de-siècle"farewell" adagio to reveal something radically young. Along with many of his subsequent works, Sub-Kontur counters the world-weary pain of old Romanticism with a strategic immaturity. It suggests that beneath the finale of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, there is an infantine ball of appetite that simply cannot be denied, even if it is wrapped in webs of life-long repression. This may be the archetype of many Rihm works: a step-by-step recollection of all the unreasonable things children want before the world tells them to compromise their instincts — eternal life, unbound bodily freedom, total satiation of desire.
Many people today may come to know Rihm's music through the recently completed Jagden und Formen, "Hunts and Forms." An hour-long gauntlet of virtuosity, it's making the rounds in Europe with great success, and has just been released on Deutsche Grammophon's 20/21 label in a furiously exact performance by Ensemble Modern. The score shows that, 25 years after Sub-Kontur, Rihm's sound has evolved. But his best instincts — to hunt music with music, and psyche with psyche — remain intact. The piece itself is a kind of anti-Tutuguri — where the former hatched its brilliance from bestial frames, Jagden und Formen conceals its beast in layers of brilliance. Rihm assembled the work in stages (he calls them "conditions") between 1995 and 2001, erasing, layering, splitting and splicing the music like a painter or sculptor. This ninth and final condition has a kind of jeopardous translucence; it glistens with a high-tech sheen, sleek and hyperreal, but you can detect a monstrous tide beneath its glassy polyphonic webs. The tension generates great comedy: peril is woven into farce, and the music scrambles after itself with a kind of Buster Keaton mania. The apparitions of Europe's senior composers begin to haunt the score as Rihm forges the gestural fingerprints of Boulez, Berio, Lachenmann, and Birtwistle as if, in desperation, he must recruit all his influences into the chase. But the tables turn when the music catches up with its prey. The overtaxed polyphony scatters and petrifies under the weight of an implausible Wagnerian apotheosis. The hunter is gobbled up by his beast, and it's the last beast he would have expected.
Funny and traumatic, the moment is entirely its own, and in a way that, like much of Rihm's output, is difficult to describe. The mask may be "Romantic," or "Modernist," or "Post-Modernist," but the actual face of Rihm's music remains happily beyond reach. It eludes language — whether analysis or ad-copy. The best tactic for evoking Rihm's music might ultimately be to make one's language childlike, "strategically immature." This is what Rihm's friend and fellow composer Luca Lombardi does in a recent essay honoring Rihm on his 50th birthday. He sheds his grammar and syntax, and gives up on logical coherence. Instead, he throws out a bundle of incompatible adjectives, like a little boy meticulously describing something that doesn't actually exist. An uncanny reflection of Rihm's music materializes, in the rifts between the words:
...bruitistic, wild, organic, subdued, sometimes defenseless, radical and traditional, foreseeable, transparent, insisting, obsessive, manic, acidic, nerve-racking, courageous.declaring, moving, forward-moving and turning-back, complex and simple, unrestrained, unruly, vehement, stormy, bodily (whereby the stomach is a thinking organ and the brain part of the body), calling-out, calling-out in the desert of new music...
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