‘The blast has arrived at the body’: Wolfgang Rihm’s creative explosion of 1981

The period from 1979 to 1982 was a key developmental time for Rihm. Starting from his time in Rome as recipient of the German Art Academy Fellowship, he commenced a series of works some of which were not completed until a year or more after his return from Italy. At this point, he began to articulate for himself a relationship with graphic arts and sculpture on the one hand, and poetical texts, often by schizophrenics, on the other. By the beginning of 1981, he was ready to express himself in written words on the relationship between music and painting, or more precisely, his relationship with the other art forms. His continuing association with the painter Kocherscheidt and his ‘discovery’ of Arnulf Rainer and Antonin Artaud gave him an impetus which propelled compositional developments in that year. Some works which had been started, such as the fourth string quartet, were completed but, ultimately dismissed as, in effect, belonging to his compositional past, rather than looking to the future. The works which followed the string quartet, and especially Tutuguri (and Tutuguri VI in particular), were pivotal in his developing compositional processes and aesthetic, but, the path forward was not always straightforward.