The highly prolific Wolfgang Rihm has been one of the most influential European composers born in the decade after World War II. Rihm was among the figures of his generation who effected a shift in the European avant-garde’s orientation, away from an essentially intellectual and structuralist conception of art to one in which expressive immediacy and emotion have an important place, and musical form is treated with more flexibility. As Josef Häusler has observed, traces of this trend may be observed in Rihm’s music in the “new emergence of such ‘historical’ phenomena as motivic-thematic working, and in undisguised references to the stylistic ambience of Bruckner and Mahler.” In Rihm’s Third Quartet, one might point to the second movement, where the suspension-laden texture and rich slowness echo Mahler’s sound world. Subtitled Im Innersten—“To the Heart of Things” might be an appropriate translation—the work was composed in 1976 and stands squarely in the great European tradition of the string quartet. Its six distinct movements, for example, bear a certain relationship to the four-movement sonata cycle traditional to the genre—the first movement of Rihm’s quartet corresponds to the traditional opening allegro; the second, third, and fourth form an extended slow movement; the fifth has something of the character of a scherzo; and the sixth movement is a slow finale à la late Mahler. The work forges other links to tradition as well. As Alastair Williams has noted, it is full of allusions to Janácek’s Second Quartet (Listy duverné, “Intimate Letters”), to the opening violin melody of the “Cavatina” from Beethoven’s Op. 130 Quartet, and, throughout, the sound world of Berg’s Lyric Suite.
A Deruchie [ii-07]
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Thursday, September 8, 2011. Development & maintenance: DIM.