Synopsis
How do contemporary composers deal with the fact of death?Question: To what extent is music always about death?
Wolfgang Rihm: First of all, it is itself a sign of passing. It begins and
it ends, and it is kept alive precisely by the fact that it is subject to decay. Music does not exist, it does not last, although it comes to life in time through duration in the first place. But it does not last. Its real life, the most important form of its life is then in becoming heard. In the moment after being heard, in the listener, in each individual listener. Thus, through each recognition, she experiences birth. An enormous increased birth, a rebirth, a multiple rebirth.
Question: Whereby this birth already fades away in the moment of being born. A birth to death.
Wolfgang Rihm: Yes, it is a dialectical process. It is not a birth in order to finally exist now, but that is already existing, so in being born the music dies.
Conversations with WOLFGANG RIHM, DETLEV MÜLLER-SIEMENS and the editors of the series "KAMMERMUSIK AUS THERESIENSTADT.
Music by Heinrich Schütz, Tomas Luis de Victoria, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Victor Ullmann, Wolfgang Rihm, Detlev Müller-Siemens.
"But at last, youth! you are burning up.
You restless, dreamy one!
Peaceful and cheerful then is old age!"
(Text excerpt of the song "Abendphantasie" by Victor Ullmann, Theresienstadt 1943)
On the same subject:
In being born, music dies
