Lichtzwang

The highly percussive, battering nature of the opening of Dis-Kontur (1974) speaks more of primal matters than it does of highly structured modernism. Rihm claims that he wrote the introduction to this piece in one go, and intuitively at that. It was only later that he realized that the accents lay in the proportions 5:7:2:9, ratios that he went on to utilize in the internal construction of the piece. Rihm sees his music as in the Austro-German tradition (he mentions not only Beethoven, Bruckner, and Mahler as part of this line, but also Hartmann).

The violin works of the leading German composer Wolfgang Rihm encompass almost his entire career and reflect the variety of his stylistic thinking. ‘Lichtzwang,’ the earliest of his concertos, draws on chorale-like sequences and piercing outbursts alike in its memorializing of the writer Paul Celan. ‘Dritte Musik’ begins almost imperceptibly before growing in intensity and eventually slipping beyond audibility. Defter and more subtle than the preceding pieces, ‘Gedicht des Malers’ (Poem of the Painter) was inspired by an imagined painting of the great Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaye. As Rihm has written: “The soloist virtually embodies the painter’s brush as it moves over the canvas in sometimes faster and sometimes more deliberate ways.”