Among many tributes today to the prolific German composer:
Leipzig Volkszeitung: The last great German composer.
Michael Haefliger: Wolfgang Rihm, the leader of our Lucerne Festival Academy passed away last night. We are in tears and ever so thankful for all he did for our Academy and Lucerne Festival. Our thoughts are with his wife Verena and his family.
Cornelis de Bondt: It’s always heart-warming to read the sympathies when a composer has died. It makes us realize that this articulates the unavoidable truth about composers: real composers are dead composers. Long live the dead composers.
Kevin Scott: The music world has lost a major figure in Wolfgang Rihm. I first heard his music by way of Anne-Sophie Mutter’s recording of Time Chant with Levine and the Chicago Symphony. I found it rather interesting but not enough to grab me. Now I know that a lot of folks love his music, and there are those who simply can’t warm to it. But sometimes you do get one work that can grab you where you say “time to re-evaluate”, and in hearing his brief first symphony, it makes me want to hear more of his work and see whether I can warm to more of it or not.
Steven Isserlis: So sad to hear of the death of Wolfgang Rihm, the distinguished German composer. We met at a birthday concert for a mutual friend (also now departed, alas), and the upshot was Wolfgang’s 3rd cello concerto. I loved spending time with him: shy, vastly knowledgeable, deeply warm.
Jan Vogler: R.I.P. Wolfgang Rihm! Your music will live on, and so will all the wonderful memories of the time spent together and all the inspiration received.
Momo Kodama: It was the first project the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe asked me if I could do when I arrived as a freshly appointed professor – Stepping in at the 70th birthday concert of the world-famous composer and professor at our Hochschule, Wolfgang Rihm.
Of course I couldn’t refuse … I learned and played his “Episode” for violin and piano with Tianwa Yang, which he composed for Renaud Capucon and the Menuhin Festival the year before… He came to our rehearsal and heard his piece for the first time .
He was a tall and vital gentlemen but I could never forget that he was so moved, almost in tears after the first reading, and his sparkle in his eyes was like a little child discovering something new in the world. He was so charming, full of humour and gave us very valuable advice.
We also played the work he wished for his birthday concert: Fauré’s Piano Trio, with Benedict Klöckner. We were actually a little surprised by his choice because we were expecting some Brahms or Schumann. I dared to ask him why: he simply said that he adored all his life Fauré, Debussy and Ravel and their refined colours. And he was so beautifully and affectionately talking about those composer. He will be greatly missed, but his music will be with us.
Silvana Sintow-Behrens: Some very significant contemporary composers have left us this year so far – Peter Eötvös, Aribert Reimann and now also Wolfgang Rihm.
SWR Symphonieorchester: Wolfgang Rihm, one of the composers particularly associated with our orchestra, has left us! With him we lose one of the most influential and most played composers of our time.
Patrick Sutardjo: What I like about the music of my former composition teacher Wolfgang Rihm who shortly died is his organic and natural approach to music integrating tradition and modernism as a postmodern expression of raw neo expressionist musical freedom of complex haptic simplicity.
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