I find it rather uplifting that, in a global market, a great composer can be revered in one section of the world and totally ignored in the rest.
It is entirely to the credit of Wolfgang Rihm, who died this weekend, that he remains virtually unknown in the English-speaking world.
In his native Germany, and in neighbouring Austria and Switzerland, Rihm ranked as the most performed living composer and the most prolific. He was resident composer at the Berlin Philharmonic, the Salzburg and Lucerne festivals and other summits of classical activity.
In Britain and the US, he had name recognition in the diminishing puddle of contemporary music, and nothing beyond. The BBC put on a weekend of his music at the Barbican some 15 years ago but the uptake was so poor the experiment was never repeated.
This, to my mind, redounds enormously to Rihm’s credit. He wrote copiously for the audience that he knew. He neither compromised nor sought to ingratiate himself with others. He went to his death with unsulled integrity, a composer with an original voice that appealed only to a specific geographic area.
Like, for instance, the exquisite French symphonist Albert Roussel, the troubled Dane Ruud Langgard, the Norwegian Fartein Valen and, to a considerable extent, our own Michael Tippett and the American Henry Cowell. Each of them worthy in a particular way, just not beyond national borders.
Perhaps the most extreme case is Bohuslav Martinu, whom Czechs consider right up there with Dvorak and Smetana,, but the rest of the world stubbornly refuses to know. I have spent many of the happiest listening hours of my life with Martinu (pictured), but I understand that he’s an acquired taste and I would never dream of forcing him on anyone. I cherish him all the more because he is not a universal brand. I love him for his quirks as much as for his genius.
And now that Rihm is gone I don’t have to feel guilty any more about never having been thrilled by his music as much as I am by, say, Birtwistle, Turnage, Muhly, Reich, Zehavi, Barbara, Michel Legrand and many more with whom I share a non-musical language, culture, society, cuisine or general palette of taste.
This does not make Rihm less of a great composer. On the contrary, I esteem him more for not having liked him much. I might even listen to him again, once the lifetime adulation dies down. I am sorry he’s gone and I am happy to accept that, for Germans, he was (as a Leipzig newspaper said) the last great composer.
Let’s face it, the composers we love are often the ones they don’t.
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