Rihm

Wolfang Rihm is a significant figure in contemporary German music. Born in 1952 in Karlsruhe, he received a traditional musical education. Although he later studied with Stockhausen, he never fully embraced the experimentalism of Darmstadt and Donaueschingen.

When I compose, I don't want to force the construction or plan of the work to emerge, but I want to participate in the changing flow of forms; I just want to go inside, to be carried away.

Rihm's second work, Jakob Lenz (1977/78), for soloists, choir, and chamber orchestra, can be found on AGP: two oboes (also cor anglais), a clarinet (also bass clarinet), a bassoon (also contrabassoon), a trumpet, a trombone, a percussionist, a harpsichord (sometimes, as in Scenes X and XI, amplified), and three cellos. The violin is notably absent from the strings and the flute from the woodwinds. The singers exploit all types of emission, from speech to actual intonation; even recitation is often inserted with a wide range of nuances and inflections.

The text is based on a short story by Büchner, adapted by Michael Fröhling, which focuses on the figure of the German poet Lenz. He anticipated Romanticism just as Büchner was the precursor of Expressionism. The poet Michael Reinhold Lenz, born in Livonia in 1751, was found dead on the street in Moscow one day in 1792. His was a hard, suffering, and marginalized life, torn between a pietistic religious upbringing and an attraction to pagan and erotic naturalism. Continuing the chain of references that characterizes the evocative side of Rihm's writing, we recall that Lenz was, for a certain period, a friend of Goethe. A phrase from Faust, in the first part, symbolizes Lenz's atrocious internal conflict: "Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast; and one is always divided from the other." In 1778, Lenz showed the first real symptoms of schizophrenia, and his condition was recorded in a diary kept by Pastor Johann Friedrich Oberlin, who hosted him in Waldbach. It was this diary that provided Büchner with the material for his novella. Rihm's score carries a common thread that leads through Büchner's Lenz and Woyzeck to Berg. This thread is evident not only in certain stylistic features, but also in symbolic analogies, such as the baritone role assigned to Lenz, which coincides with that of Wozzeck in Berg's opera.

From AGP you can download the opera in FLAC format, divided into four files with notes.

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