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Swaying with Schumann: Subjectivity and Tradition in Wolfgang Rihm's 'Fremde Szenen'
I-III and Related Scores

Author(s): Alastair Williams
Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Aug., 2006), pp. 379-397
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3876905
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Music & Letters, Vol. 87 No. 3, ? The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
doi: 10.1093/ml/gci234, available online at www.ml.oxfordjournals.org
SWAYING WITH SCHUMANN: SUBJECTIVITY AND

TRADITION IN WOLFGANG RIHM'S 'FREMDE SZENEN'
I-III AND RELATED SCORES
By AIASTAIR WILAMS
WOLFGANG RI HM'S Fremde Szenen I-III (1982-4), a set of piano trios, de

of Schumann's musical style not only as a memory but also as an i
This layering of past and present creates a sense of instability, not
result is far from aesthetically conservative. By offering music that is
sounds like Schumann-or, more precisely, like an amalgam of Rihm
Rihm's set invites even the most casual listener to reflect on the
sounds. For this reason, the issues arising in Fremde Szenen, and in othe
extend well beyond the immediate context of contemporary Germ
current musicology, Rihm is in the process of re-evaluating a classic
no longer take its cultural pre-eminence for granted.
In the face of such uncertainty, both composers and musicologis
Andrew Bowie considers to be 'the problem of modern hermeneutics
lem of interpretation in the face of the loss of binding traditions'.1
responds to the dilemma in this case by engaging with a composer
whelmed by the weighty obligations of tradition, and he approache
a name for a set of practices than as the composer of autonomous w
tion of Schumann examines the past not only in its strangeness but
acy, finding there a latency that speaks to the present. So questions
immediately raised for anyone familiar with the traditions access
What does it mean at the end of the twentieth century to compose
music? What does this music say about modernism? Is this music no
subjectivity conveyed in this music? Because Fremde Szenen is so ob
these questions can only be answered by drawing on a ran
approaches.
RIHM AND TRADITION
The string of performances and premieres that took place in the

birthday (2002) confirmed that he is one of the most important (
currently working in Europe. While few of his pieces respond to
I wish to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a research fellowship that e
topic; the Music Department of the Humboldt University, Berlin, for hosting this fellow
dation, Basel, for allowing access to the Sammlung Wolfgang Rihm. Thanks also to the two
comments on this article. Versions of this article were presented at the Humboldt Universi
universities: Bangor, Cardiff, King's College London, Royal Holloway (University of L
was also presented, as a paper, at the Third Biennial International Conference on Twentie
University of Nottingham in 2003.
1 Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: he Philosophy of German Literary The
2 For more on 'practices' in relation to the work-concept in the 19th c., see Jim Sam
Nineteenth-Century History', in id. (ed.), The Cambridge History ofNAineteenth-Centuly Music
379
to the extent that Fremde Szenen does, many of them, particularly from the 1970s, are sat-
urated with historical memory. Indeed, this characteristic is evident in the concluding
Mahlerian Abgesang of Morphonie, Sektor IVfor string quartet and orchestra (1972-3)-the
work that brought Rihm to prominence in 1974 at the Donaueschingen Music Festival.
This score provided a benchmark for the extreme late and post-Romantic textures that
Rihm was to deploy extensively in the 1970s, for example in the two massive orchestral
Adagios, Dis-Kontur (1974) and Sub-Kontur (1974-5). The former opens with huge ham-
mer and bass drum blows and proceeds in discontoured shapes, punctuated by pauses
that resonate with the corporality of the music; the latter provides a similar topography
in its opening percussion blows, minus hammer, and subsequent thick textures. Josef
Hitusler writes, appropriately, of 'massive accumulations of energy which clash and
explode'.3 A little later these preoccupations assume huge proportions in the Third
Symphony (1976-7), where the first movement alone is a four-part Adagio and the
second movement explores similar territory, partly through vocal settings of Friedrich
Nietzsche and Arthur Rimbaud.
Rihm's chamber music offers an even wider array of allusions. Reinhold Brinkmann
argues that Musikfiir drei Streicher (1977)-an extended piece organized in three parts
and subdivided into a total of seven movements-contains allusions to Beethoven's late
quartets. The strongest link, he maintains, is with Op. 131 (another seven-movement
work) because Rihm's trio evokes, through a range of shapes, the opening three notes of
Beethoven's quartet.4 Rihm's Third String Quartet, Im Innersten, is also full of allusions
its very title evokesJandek's Second Quartet, Listy dvemni; it includes a modified quota-
tion (b. 6 of the fourth movement) from the opening violin melody of the Cavatina from
Beethoven's Op. 130 quartet;5 and, Joachim Briigge notes, it also draws on the sound
world of Alban Berg's Lyrische Suite. Moreover, the second movement recalls the late-
Romantic feel of the orchestral works mentioned above when it tapers down to an ada-
gio, offering shelter from the surrounding agitated textures.
Rihm is also active as a composer for the stage. An early success in this arena was the
chamber opera Jakob Lenz (1977-8), widely performed in Germany, which stands as
another example of his inclusive tendencies.6 It also exemplifies his fascination with the
theme of insanity by dramatizing Georg Btichner's novella about the eponymous poet's
descent into madness.' Interestingly, Schumann was clearly in Rihm's mind when he
wrote this chamber opera since one of its interludes includes a section marked 'Eine Art
Traumbild' (A Sort of Vision), which provides an orchestrated quotation from 'Kind im
Einschlummern', the penultimate piece from Kinderszenen, Op. 15 (the source is even
printed in the score, p. 81). Here Schumann's rocking lullaby rhythm accompanies two
singing children who observe the course of Lenz's deterioration.
3Joseph Hausler, 'Rihm, Wolfgang' in New Grove II, xxi. 387-92 (p. 21).
Reinhold Brinkmann, 'Wirkungen Beethovens in der Kammermusik', in Sieghard Brandenburg and Helmut Loos
(eds.), Beitrage zu Beethovens Kammermusik: Symposion Bonn 1984 (Munich, 1987), 79-110 (pp. 81-4, 105-8).
5 This reference is also noted by Brinkmann, ibid. 1 10 n. For further discussion of Im Innersten, see Joachim Briigge,
'Zur Form und Asthetik in Wolfgang Rihms drittem Streichquartett Im Innersten (1976)', Die Musikforschung, 52 (1999),
178-89. For a more general discussion of Rihm's quartets see Ulrich Mosch, 'Streichquartett - ein magisches Wort: Zu
Wolfgang Rihms Schaffen fuir Streichquartett', Positionen, 34 (1998), 47-50, and Beate Kutschke, 'Anmerkungen zu
Wolfgang Rihms Werken fuir Streichquartett', Berliner Festwochen 1997 (programme book), 10-21.
6 For a discussion of whether the musical language of Jakob Lent is progressive or conservative, see Hanns-Werner
Heister, 'Sackgasse oder Ausweg aus dem Elfenbeinturm? Zur musikalischen Sprache in Wolfgang Rihm'sJakob Lenzt', in
Otto Kolleritsch (ed.), Zur 'Neuen Einfachheit' in der Musik (Vienna and Graz, 1981), 106-25.
7 Rihm frequently sets texts by other writers associated with insanity such as Friedrich Nietzsche in the last movement
of the Third Symphony (1976-7) and in three of the Abgesangsszenen (1979); Friedrich Holderlin in the Hiilderlin-Fragmente
(1976-7); Adolf Wlfli in the Wilfli-Liederbuch (1980-1); and Antonin Artaud in Tutuguri (1980), Die Eroberung von Mexico
(1987-91), and Siraphin. Versuch eines Theaters (1994).
380
By invoking horizons of the past and the present, Rihm is able to explore and to
transform the multiple strands that constitute musical subjectivity. Such processes are
dramatized in his next stage work, Die Hamletmaschine (1983-6), which is a modified set-
ting of Heiner Miiller's text by the same name; its composition overlaps with the years
(1982-4) when Rihm was working on Fremde Szenen. Significantly, it examines how we
confront ghosts of the past, considers the burdens history places on us, and explores the
mechanics of performing particular roles. Rihm himself puts the context as follows: 'All
this in front of the "ruins of Europe" whose dust is still the best nourishment for anyone
who wants to confront things or wants to know where we come from, where we are
going; for whomever it is not enough that something functions, who-himself a
machine-comes to terms with his own origins, his identity.'8 Leaving aside its Eurocen-
tricism (which can be excused by the context in which Rihm is speaking), this statement
suggests that tradition is both a burden and an opportunity, casting the European canon
in the ghostly role of a father who presents a continual challenge to the present.9
The most obvious historical reference in the opera is an aria from Handel's cantata
Lucrezia in which the baritone Hamlet character (there are two others) sings self-
doubting words (while briefly assuming the identity of Richard the Third) that conflict
with the regal confidence of the music. The line 'OH MY PEOPLE WHAT HAVE I
DONE UNTO THEE' (set in English) clearly evokes the king as a father figure, yet in
the context of the Handelian music also permits us to read/hear this passage as a cul-
tural history being called to account for the present. There is certainly no lack of cul-
tural-historical reference in Die Hamletmaschine: the three Hamlets allude to various
Shakespearean roles, while Ophelia opens the final scene with the words 'Here speaks
Elektra'. All in all, Die Hamletmaschine's engagement with the rubble of history manifests
Rihm's aesthetic of inclusivity at its fiercest.
It is likely that the allusions in Rihm's music stem more from the composer's memo-
ries and impressions, both intentional and unintentional, of established repertory than
from systematic referencing. Indeed Rihm makes a passing comment on this issue in an
essay on Dis-Kontur. 'I never quote literally, always filtered and assimilated. Even the
intonation, which one can indeed quote, has come first through my larynx and lips
before it makes itself recognizable as a "brought in" (hereingefallener) tone.'"0 In any case
these scores do not simply rework existing music: they are very much pieces in their own
right. In a discussion of Rihm's Deus Passus: Passions-Stiicke nach Lukas (2000), Arnold
Whittall puts the matter, appropriately, as the 'symbiosis of accepting yet resisting asso-
ciations with tradition'."
A prolific writer, Rihm has plenty more to say on music and tradition: in a typically
bold statement we find him declaring: 'Tradition can only ever be "my tradition".'"2
Like many of Rihm's comments on music, this thought is simultaneously interesting and
problematic: interesting because it suggests that the canon and modernism, when dis-
embedded from the traditions that previously provided them with established meaning,
become susceptible to reinterpretation; problematic because it implies that Rihm, the
8 Rihm, 'Avenues of Approach, Hamlet Machine', trans. John Patrick Thomas; liner notes to recording of Die Hamlet-
maschine, WER 6195-2 (1991), 11-14 at 12, and 'Ganggarten, Hamletmaschine, Brief an P.O.' (1987), in id., Ausgesprochen:
Schriften und Gespriiche, ed. Ulrich Mosch, 2 vols. (Mainz, 1997), ii. 350-3 at 352-3.
9 This is the way Rihm put the matter in a discussion at the conference held in the Alte Oper, Frankfurt am Main
(Sept. 2002), entitled 'Komponistenportrait Wolfgang Rihm: Ausdruck, Zugriff, Differenzen'.
10 a'Uber
unless Dis-Kontur.
translator Notizen
is acknowledged. zu einen Vortrag' (1976/1997), in Ausgesprochen, ii. 291-6 at 293. Translations are mine
" Arnold Whittall, Exploring Twentieth-Century Music: Tradition and Innovation (Cambridge, 2003), 144.
12 Rihm, 'Musikalische Freiheit' (1983/1996), in Ausgesprochen, i. 23-39 at 23. This essay also appears in Wolfgang
Rihm, Offene Enden: Denkbewegungen um und durch Musik, ed. Ulrich Mosch (Munich and Vienna, 2002), 51-86 at 51.
381
composer, imprints a core identity on any material he encounters. As we shall see, this
tension between the immediacy of intuition and the mediation of consciousness through
culture and history is a creative seam running through Fremde Szenen. For now, it will suf-
fice to note that because for Rihm tradition feeds uncertainty about the future, it neither
restricts him nor offers him security.13
LAYERS AND EVENTS
The term 'Chiffre' (cipher) occurs so frequently when Rihm write

it is reasonable to suppose that references to the past in his oeuvre
sign system, which includes modernist influences. Most obviously
title for the series of nine (including Bild) Chiffre pieces (1982-8), but
heading to Rihm's Jakob Lenz programme note, 'Chiffren von Ver
zu Jakob Lenz' (Ciphers of Disturbance: Comments on Jakob L
descriptions of other pieces.14 In the essay on Sub-Kontur, for examp
melodic adagio, as a cipher of an existing type of musical langua
under, through the omnipresent attacks of a musical raw state.'"
den stratum is related to the idea of a sub-contour embodied in th
tions as a signifying layer that is readily heard in the performance of
However, the dedication of Sub-Kontur to Karlheinz Stockhaus
teacher (1972-3), offers a strong hint that nineteenth-century fo
influence on this score. Indeed Wolf Frobenius indicates that in con
only acknowledged his admiration for Stockhausen's sense of prop
but also indicated the influence of two of his pieces in particular
(1973-4) offered sonic resources-and Frobenius gives examples of
between Sub-Kontur and the opening (Japanese) theme of Inori--a
provided innovations in form. Momente is, of course, known for its u
that is, of events that are not dependent on a cumulative structu
presence. While Rihm neither explores the idea in the quasi-s
Stockhausen chooses nor abandons more traditional approaches t
multivalent sound events is important not only for Sub-Kontur, w
and juxtaposed, but also for much of Rihm's output. Moreover, it
manipulation of recorded sound objects found in Hymnen (1966-7
Rihm's compositional approach.17
Staying with Sub-Kontur for the moment, Frobenius also poin
forces in the piece, such as the tempo scheme, which accelerates
score before dropping back at the end; the outline of a sonata f
proportion and duration in the music. The last of these dimension
the fact that Rihm acknowledges in Dis-Kontur, Sub-Kontur's sister p
portional scheme: 5:7:2:9;8' he also used the same ratio in Klavierst
the scaffolding of a rondo-like form, with the opening material r
and at the end.'9 Therefore, even though neither Sub-Kontur nor
by a constructivist aesthetic, both pieces are nevertheless aesthet
'" Rihm, 'Musikalische Freiheit', in Ausgesprochen, i. 38. Offene Enden, 72.
14 Rihm, 'Chiffren von Verst6rung: Anmerkungen zu Jakob Lenz' (1979), in Ausgesproche
n5 Rihm, 'AnlaBlich Sub-Kontur' (1976), in Ausgesprochen, ii. 297-9 at 298.
16 Wolf Frobenius, 'Die "Neue Einfachheit" und der burgerliche Schonheitsbegriff, in K
Einfachheit' in der Musik, 48-60 at 53 and 59-60 n.
7 For a discussion of quotation in Hymnen, see David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning
(Cambridge, 2003), 139-55.
18 Wolfgang Rihm, 'Dis-Kontur fur groBles Orchester' (1975 and 1978), in Ausgesprochen,
19 Rihm, 'Klavierstick Nr. 4' (1974), in Ausgesprochen, ii. 287-8 at 288.
382
they contain so many signifying strands, or ciphers, which together serve to cancel out
any pre-established order.
In the essay 'Musikalische Freiheit' Rihm talks of 'free prose', which he explains as
'music that renews itself in every moment-really Debussy's ideal-music whose course
lies in its own energy, which the composer tracks down in musical objects and sets
free'.2" Elaborating on this idea, Rihm writes in two ways about events as cells: first, as
closed units which, because they are not disposed to development, can be placed as dis-
connected elements in space; second, as cores, or germs, which can be set free in devel-
opment.2 Although Rihm is talking here of musical events at a localized level, he also
claims, in less precise terms, that such processes arise simultaneously with the concep-
tion of the whole form.22 At any rate, there are clear parallels between Rihm's classifica-
tion and the distinction Pierre Boulez makes between complex blocks, which require
simple external organization, and simple material, which can be developed in complex
ways.23 More surprising, perhaps, are Rihm's comments onJohn Cage: instead of berat-
ing the erasure of subjectivity in his music, as one might expect, Rihm comments that
for him Cage provides a strong and convincing annulment of the traditional aesthetic of
coherence.24
By making connections with Debussy, Boulez, Cage (and Stockhausen), Rihm indi-
cates, even when using traditional forms or indeed tonal harmony, he associates events
in ways that are not determined by established methods. In the context of Fremde Szenen,
for instance, it is clear that the ways in which he tracks down energy in Schumannesque
objects and deploys this 'found' material is very much in keeping with his broader com-
positional approach. It is appropriate, then, to think of this music in terms of events
capable of interacting and bonding in more than one way. This approach certainly res-
onates with the frequent references to painting in Rihm's writings, whether or not allu-
sive music is being discussed, which impart a tactile dimension to this musical
understanding. The idea of a hidden contour, or of music stratified in such a way as to
let levels rise and sink, already has a painterly quality to it because it suggests a canvas in
which an underlying shape is partly visible and partly concealed. It is no surprise, then,
that in the 1990s these tendencies fed into the more overt use of what Rihm, alluding to
the Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer, calls 'Ubermalung' (overpainting) to describe the
process of adding layers to existing music. Vers une symphonie leuve I (1992/1995), for
example, adds a string layer to a previously composed piece for wind and percussion,
et nunc (1992), so that the object is transformed, partly because it is submerged and
partly because it is presented in a new context. Such procedures are continued in the
five versions to date offleuve, and in the way that Jagden und Formen (2001) absorbs three
earlier scores. With hindsight, it is not difficult to project such techniques back to the
historically saturated musical reworkings that constitute Fremde Szenen.
20 Rihm, 'Musikalische Freiheit', in Ausgesprochen, i. 26; Offene Enden, 56-7.

21 Ibid., Ausgesprochen, i. 35; Offene Enden, 70-1. I found Nielinger-Vakil's discussion of these passages helpful: Carola
Nielinger-Vakil, 'Quiet Revolutions: H6lderlin Fragments by Luigi Nono and Wolfgang Rihm', Music & Letters, 81
(2000), 245-69 at 261.
22 'Musikalische Freiheit', in Ausgesprochen, i. 31, and Offene Enden, 64.
23 See Pierre Boulez, 'Timbre and Composition-Timbre and Language', trans. R. Robertson, in Contemporary Music
Review, 2 (1987), 161-71 at 166-7. Rihm continues his discussion by again mentioning Moment-form, and what he calls
the 'interchangeability of parts' ('Vertauschbarkeit der Teile') in Boulez; 'Musikalische Freiheit', in Ausgesprochen, i. 38,
and Offene Enden, 71. This phrase could relate to Boulez's use of block construction or, perhaps, to the form of the Third
Piano Sonata.
24 Rihm, 'Musikalische Freiheit', in Ausgesprochen, i. 34, and Offene Enden, 68.
383
AN EXPANDED MODERNISM
The immediate past from which Rihm emerged in 1974 was that o
whose constructivist concerns were apparently challenged by his r
subjectivity and inclusivity. It is not surprising, then, that Rihm-a
called 'neo-Romantic' composers of the time such as Manfred
Mtiller-Siemens-featured in German debates on postmodernism in
discussions advanced, however, and as the connections between mo
modernism became more apparent (as demonstrated when Herm
of 'postmodernism as the modernism of the present'),26 so Rihm's li
also become more evident. This perception suggests that Rihm's in
better seen as an expansion of constructivist concerns-as his tribu
and Helmut Lachenmann suggest27--than as a negation of them.
The situation becomes even more nuanced when one considers th
dents for Rihm's engagement with the past. Bernd Alois Zimmerm
his opera Die Soldaten (1958-64), had remained independent of the d
of the 1950s and 1960s in a style that sometimes combined quotatio
an attempt to create a simultaneity of past, present, and future. In
Kagel had consistently maintained a distance from high moder
idiosyncratic aesthetic that did not hesitate to draw on a range of
Schumann, even though its recourse to irony is unlikely to have inf
precisely, Kagel evokes Schumann in his 'Lieder Opera' (as the
Deutschland (1981) and in his Mittemachtsstiik (1981/1986). Written shor
Szenen, Aus Deutschland stages scenes from famous song cycles by Schu
drawing attention not only to the dramatic potential of this genre b
and production. Mitternachtsstiik, for voices and instruments (which ta
its title from Schumann), continues the exploration of romanticism
fragments from Schumann's diaries.
Furthermore, Schumann is also an important presence in the
Killmayer, and it is likely that Rihm would have been familiar wi
Endenich - Kammermusik no. 2 (1972). Just after Rihm composed h
Huber also re-examined Schumann from a late twentieth-cent
Demnjour for oboe, cello, and piano (1985-6) and Air mit 'Sphinxes' f
(1987). Schumann was certainly in the air because Henri Pousse
directly, after Rihm's set of pieces, in his Dichterliebesreigentraum (199
Rihm was not alone among central European composers in referri
way of expanding modernism's range of reference, and nor was h
upon Schumann as an emblem of German romanticism. Furthermor
not restricted to central Europe, as I want to show by looking bri
Holloway and Rochberg in order to indicate how Rihm both parti
apart from a wider dynamic.
25 For commentary on this debate, see Joakim Tillman, 'Postmodernism and Art Music
Judy Lochhead andJoseph Auner (eds.) Postmodern Music/Postmodemrn Thought (New York an
26 Hermann Danuser, 'Postmodernes Musikdenken - L6sung oder Flucht?', in id. (ed.), N
Wandel (Mainz, 1991), 56-66 at 63. The idea of an expanded modernism, deriving from a r
aesthetics, is expounded by Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence ofModernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics
David Midgley (Cambridge, 1991). This text is referred to by Danuser in 'Postmodernes M
entry 'Neue Musik' in MGG', Sachteil, vii. 75-122 at 111.
27 Rihm presented a tribute to Stockhausen in 1986 when the latter won the Ernst von Si
same year, and did the same for Helmut Lachenmann when he won the prize in 1997. Ausge
28 For more on Aus Deutschland, see Bjorn Heile, The Music ofMauricio Kagel (Ashgate, forthcom
384
In the context of Fremde Szenen, it is interesting to note that encounters with Schumann
provided the English composer Robin Holloway with a way of escaping what he
describes as a modernist impasse.29 This release materialized in his Scenes firom Schumann
(1970), a set of orchestral pieces derived from Schumann songs, and was quickly fol-
lowed by the ensemble score Fantasy-Pieces on the Heine 'Liederkreis' of Schumann (1971).
Writing of Scenes from Schumann Holloway comments: 'I have attempted to get "inside"
the songs and from inside to send them in different directions. Though there is hardly a
bar left which could have been written by Schumann, the intention is not to distort but
rather to amplify and intensify the originals.'" In some ways these aims are comparable
to Rihm's, not least because Holloway also wrote instrumental music, despite its vocal
origins.
But there are, of course, also important distinctions to be made between the two
approaches: for one thing, even though Rihm focuses on Schumann's piano trios, he
does not, like Holloway, rework existing music; for another, Holloway, despite inven-
tiveness, seeks in Schumann a comfortable place to inhabit, whereas Rihm is prepared
to project his chosen nineteenth-century gestures into a modernist idiom. Beyond such
dissimilarities, however, the most significant point is that two composers who were try-
ing to push beyond the constraints of constructivist composition towards a music more
aware of its own subjectivity both wrote significant pieces influenced by Schumann.
Moving across the Atlantic, George Rochberg's well-known Third String Quartet
(1972) presents an obvious parallel. In referring to Beethoven, Bart6k, and Mahler, not
for ironic effect but for expressive purposes, it invites comparison with, say, Rihm's
Musikfiir drei Streicher or indeed his own Third String Quartet. Beyond such affinities,
however, there are also important differences, not least in the career trajectory of the
two figures since Rihm, unlike Rochberg, was not previously associated with a construc-
tivist aesthetic. Furthermore, the two third quartets sound far from similar: Rochberg
juxtaposes in unexpected ways substantial passages that are stylistically consistent inter-
nally, whereas Rihm's more volatile approach changes stylistic associations from phrase
to phrase. For this reason, Rihm's music is better understood as inclusive than as plural-
ist in the sense conveyed by Rochberg's Third Quartet.3"
RIHM AND SCHUMANN
There are a number of parallels between Rihm and Schumann. First

Rihm, is a literary composer who finds it both necessary and easy to
Despite his comments on the redundancy of programme notes,
describing his musical thoughts in a non-technical manner.32 Secon
intertextual composer who quotes not only himself but also other com
bly Beethoven in the C major Fantasy, where he creates a new cont
meaning for the reworked material. Third, Schumann shares Rih
with ciphers, although Schumann uses them more as a personal cod
tic resource. Such factors make Schumann's relationship with mode
ing, because if his willingness to convey subjectivity partly by yokin
moods and musical ideas served at the time as a critique of the more
29 'Robin Holloway on Robin Holloway', liner notes to the recording ofFantasy-Pieces on the Heine
CDA66930 (1998), 2-6 at 2.
30 Composer's Note, May 1977, included in the score of Scenes from Schumann (London: Boo
3' For discussion of pluralism in Rochberg's Third Quartet, see Mark Berry, 'Music, Post
Rochberg's Third String Quartet', in Lochhead and Auner (eds.), Postmodern Music/Postmoder
For a discussion of inclusive composition, see Ulrich Mosch, 'Einleitung', in Rihm, Ausgesproche
32 See below, n. 42 for Rihm's apparent doubts on his programme note for Fremde Szenen.
385
of nineteenth-century organicism, it is even more challenging to the narrower, technical
version of that aesthetic found in high-modernist constructivism. Thus, in Rihm's
hands, a reinvention of Schumann pushes beyond the constraints of a certain strand of
high modernism by insisting on understanding music as a mode of subjectivity.
This is perhaps not surprising, because the literary-philosophical world Schumann
inhabited proves to be an important resource for considering subjectivity in a way that
rejects a binary opposition between a sovereign subject and a subject that comprises
little more than an intersection of signs, preferring a mode of identity that is neither
completely transparent nor completely opaque. As Bowie argues, the continuity of the
conscious subject between differing moments of apprehension 'led the Romantics to the
idea of a sense of self that they termed "feeling", which, as Schlegel's friend Novalis puts
it, "cannot feel itself'. "Feeling" connects the differing moments of the self without itself
being knowable in the manner of the objects of the appearing world which it renders
knowable.'33 Such a state of being is one that intersects, in complementary ways, with
the music of both Rihm and Schumann.
It is worth considering John Daverio's discussion of Schumann's system of musical
fragments in the context of such an understanding. Key to this approach is the category
of 'Witz' (wit), as used by Jean Paul, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis. As Daverio
explains it, Witz is 'the power that allows us to posit connections between markedly con-
trasting entities'. Drawing on this knowledge, he asks a question of Schumann that is
equally applicable to Rihm: 'How is the critic to deal with a work or body of works
whose form is undeniably fragmentary, but in whose construction we nonetheless sense
a measure of intuitive logic?' The answer Daverio gives, via Schlegel, is: 'The harmoni-
ously rounded products of bygone ages admit to a kind of logic that is simply not a pos-
sibility for the modern artwork, where logic gives way to contingencies, the "fantastic
constructions and experiments" of combinatory Witz.'34 Adding to this idea, he suggests
that scores such as Papillons and the Novelletten require the listener to create fragment
complexes from non-contiguous utterances; thus, he concludes, Schumann's 'fragment
systems submit to a fixed order only in performance'."5 Now Fremde Szenen is not a sys-
tem of fragments in the sense of these pieces, but it does juxtapose and superimpose tex-
tures from Schumann in ways that release unexpected latencies. It is in this sense, then,
that Rihm is both a listener to Schumann and an inventor who creates challenges for his
own listeners.
Something akin to the techniques deployed in Papillons and the Novelletten is to be
found in Rihm's Holderlin-Fragmente (1976-7), a setting of nine fragments from Holderlin's
late style, and in his Klavierstiick No. 6 (Bagatellen, 1977-8). Both scores offer a mosaic of
distinct fragments, and they are clearly linked since Rihm uses two of his Holderlin
settings ('Wie Wolken um die Zeit legt' [like clouds wraps around the hours] and 'Aber
nun ruhet er eine Weile' [But now he rests for a while]) in the piano piece.36 Rihm's will-
ingness to slot the plainly tonal harmony found in the second of these fragments into
two different contexts is a good indication that such harmony functions for him far
more as an expressive device than as a structural tool-as one might expect from a
"3 Andrew Bowie, 'Music and the Rise of Aesthetics', in Samson (ed.), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music,
29-54 at 46.
34 The preceding three quotations appear in John Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideol
(New York, 1993), 71-2. I also benefited from reading the discussion of 'Witz' in Berthold Hoeckner, Programming t
Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton, 2002), 103.
35 Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music, 87.
36 Wilhelm Killmayer, 'Zu Wolfgang Rihms Klaviersttick Nr. 6 (Bagatellen)', in id., Siegfried Mauser, and Wolfgan
Rihm (eds.), 'Klaviermusik des 20.Jahrhunderts', Melos:Jahrbuchfir zeitgenossische Musik, 51 (1992), 102-29.
386
composer who can align the Romantic fragment with modernist approaches to mobile
form.
Rihm's collected writings (Ausgesprochen) include two essays on Schumann, one of
which, 'Fremde Blatter (iiber Robert Schumann)', was given as a talk that included per-
formances of piano trios by both Schumann and Rihm.7 Schumann is also particularly
prominent in 'Musikalische Freiheit', one of Rihm's most important essays (mentioned
earlier) and one, moreover, that must have been written during the composition of
Fremde Szenen. Here we find the following comment:
Then there is a composer whose musical thinking was already perceived as anarchic by his con-
temporaries and whose musical speech propagates itself so freely that it appears to me as the
ideal case and imprint of fantasy, making its way from the inner to the outer world without
undue constriction. This composer is Robert Schumann."3
The notion that inner emotion can move from the inside to the outside with little lost
along the way seems to be one of the features that most strongly attracts Rihm to
Schumann. It is allied with the consistent theme that 'Schumann ist anders' (Schumann
is other), an idea that itself ties in with the obsession we find elsewhere, notably in the
essay title 'Musik-das innere Ausland' (Music-the Inner Foreign Land), that in music
we encounter ourselves as in some way other.39
This formulation depends on the idea of an inner identity, however estranged, that
music is mysteriously equipped to express in a direct manner. Problematically, it talks
about music as if it were a condition impervious to the force of history. However, when
the tempo marking of Fremde Szene II-'Rasch [und schwankend]' (swift [and sway-
ing])-is considered, it serves to combine a sense of abandon with historical specificity.
Rihm hints at what this marking might mean when he talks of music 'illuminated from
within by swaying light, but which is not precisely comprehensible in the moment'.40
This swaying suggests something that breaks through and unsettles the accepted sym-
bolic norms with which Schumann worked, as if the inner emotion that Rihm refers to
is inherently unstable. Before pursuing this notion of an unstable core identity, I should
like to look more closely at Fremde Szenen, paying particular attention to the second, and
longest, of the three pieces.
FREMDE SZENEN
The title Fremde Szenen I-III, subtitled Versuche fir Klaviertrio, Erste Folge (Attempts for
Piano Trio, First Instalment), echoes, presumably, that of Schumann's Kinderszenen,
which opens with 'Von fremden Landern und Menschen'. In his programme notes
Rihm talks of an archaic medium, dominated by a piece of furniture that is still with us;
and taking his cue from the word 'chamber' he also speaks of deserted rooms in which
the forbidden can take place. He makes it clear that only Schumann's tone is used, none
of his actual music;41 and instead of searching for security in period costume, he seeks
3 Rihm's comments on Schumann occur in three essays: 'Fremde Blatter (tiber Robert Schumann)' (1984), in Ausges-
prochen, i. 229-33; 'Auch tiber Robert Schumann' (1987), ibid. 234-6; and 'Fremde Szenen I-III, Versuche fuir Klaviertrio,
erste Folge' (1985), ibid. ii. 333.
38 Rihm, 'Musikalische Freiheit', in Ausgesprochen, i. 23; Offene Enden, 51-2. This is a modified version of the translation
in the liner notes to the recording of Fremde Szenen by the Beethoven Trio Ravensburg. Rudolf Frisius, 'Tradition(s)-
Impulse(s) of Compositional Freedom', trans. Susan Marie Praeder, CPO 999 119-2 (1993), 9-13 at 9.
39 Rihm, 'Fremde BlItter', in Ausgesprochen, i. 230. 'Musik-das innere Ausland', in Ausgesprochen, i. 403-15; Offene
Enden, 203-21.
4 Rihm, 'Auch fiber Robert Schumann', in Ausgesprochen, i. 234.
41 Joseph Hausler claims there is a Schumann quotation in Fremde Szene II, although he neither identifies nor locates it.
'Profil Wolfgang Rihm--ein Versuch', programme to Berlin Festwochen, 1997, pp. 22-78 at 35.
387
the strangeness of a previously inhabited space. In this music Rihm explores Schumann
in two main ways: as a kindred spirit searching for an expressive medium, and as a
strange voice, or language, with which one can become acquainted.42
The three Fremde Szenen are usually performed as a set, lasting a little over forty min-
utes, even though they do not comprise a unit in the traditional sense. Of the first,
adapting Schumann's material to the intensity of his own compositional thinking, Rihm
writes: 'Seeking the hot sound from cold intervals. Fire in ice.' He detects a sense of
strangeness most strongly in the last of Schumann's three piano trios, the G minor, Op.
110 (1851),43 and this is the influence evident in the icy textures of Fremde Szene I, where
Schumann's gestures become hardened into a compilation of frequently sparse sounds,
often using string harmonics. Of the third piece, Rihm comments: 'Actually only disrep-
utable places. Concentration and its loss.' In fact he even marks 'Verrufene Stelle' at
bar 41 in the score two bars before the only adagio passage in the set. Heard with its
companion pieces, the third piece performs something of a summative role: it opens
with the spare textures of the first piece, brings back the dotted triad passage (shown
below in Ex. 3) from the second piece-also evoked in a passage marked 'schwankend',
and explores the obsessive repetition found in the previous two pieces. Fremde Szene II,
the longest of the three pieces, is subtitled 'Charaktersttick', and the composer
describes it as a personal portrait of Schumann and his style, associating the sounds with
Schumannesque topics such as medical equipment and virtuosity.44 We encounter
Schumann at his most familiar in this piece; indeed while Rihm values the strangeness
of the G minor Trio, he notes that it does not possess the swaying passion of the Trio in
D minor, Op. 63 (1847),45 which makes its presence felt in Rihm's broken piano figures
and melodic cross rhythms.
Fremde Szene II, on which I shall concentrate, is unstable and restless, shifting from one
mood, style, or texture to another in an unpredictable manner by offsetting montages of
violent, often repetitive, and sometimes aggressively modernist gestures against lyric
lines and flowing piano textures reminiscent of Schumann's chamber works. Consider,
for instance, the dispersed melody and exaggerated features of the opening bars (Ex. 1),
which may well be influenced by the Second Intermezzo from the second piece of
Schumann's Kreisleriana, Op. 16. The two strings move together rhythmically; placed in
varying degrees of synchronicity with the fluid piano part, they create an illusory sense
of a compound rhythm across the beat. The 5/4 time signature generates further ambi-
guity in this swaying rhythm, as does the grouping of all three instruments against the
final three beats of the first bar. The second bar has three metric levels running through
it, inflating to four in the piano right hand on beats 2 and 3; add to this quirky features
such as the sffz in the piano on the final, A7, semiquaver of the fourth beat of bar 2, and
there is considerable metrical instability.46
Broadly speaking, this portrait is in sonata form, with clearly defined first and second
subjects, which can just about be related to a D flat major and A flat major key scheme,
42 The following note appears after Rihm's comments on Fremde Szenen: 'Kein Programmtext vom 1. September
1985'. Rihm, 'Fremde Szenen I-III', in Ausgesprochen, ii. 333. This enigmatic remark would seem to indicate a reluctance on
Rihm's part to write notes after 1985 (although there are plenty of them), and would also suggest that this particular text
is not to be read as a programme note. At any rate, this caution alerts us that the transition from music to text may not
always be smooth, even for a literary composer such as Rihm. I am grateful to Ulrich Mosch for advice on this matter.
43 Rihm, 'Fremde Bliatter', in Ausgesprochen, i. 230.
* Rihm, 'Fremde Szenen I-III', in Ausgesprochen, ii. 333.
45 Rihm, 'Fremde Blatter', in Ausgesprochen, i. 230.
46 Schumann's metric layering and displacement is the topic of Harald Krebs's Fantasy Pieces: Metrical Dissonance in the
Music of Robert Schumann (New York, 1999). While Rihm certainly seeks to emulate the energy of these features he hears
them through modernist ears that are willing to distort such textures beyond anything envisaged by Schumann.
388
Ex. 1. Fremde Szene II, bb. 1-4. ? 1983 by Universal Edition a.g., Wien/ue18108. Reproduced
by permission.
Rasch (und schwankend)

-1 AA
Vn
Vn. %1
sftfJ qff~l2~fp -=, zSf t

nI
Vc1
S f ftY Is g j fftP -=f=f p
Rasch (und schwankend)
AT
Pf. NON oo Sf
3_
1 104
4
;=76 7A~T I Y ~Y'
although th
The latter i
enced by th
of Schuman
sequentially,
(bb. 39-46).
emerges fro
Ex. 2). Howe
and later (b
through the
In one sens
takes motiv
heard in the
389
Ex. 2. Fremde Szene II, bb. 47-52. C 1983 by Universal Edition a.g., Wien/ue 18108. Reproduced
by permission.
47 (ruhelos) 3
6 I
r ---i '3
fespr
(ruhelos) 33----3--- - - 3------
>9) 6
50 un poco pesante a tempo
n poco pesante a tempo---
S mit Nachdruck . P z z z
k~ tl~ b[4
(even violence) re
outcome is that
are estranged by
detached from t
open cells are com
mental, blocked
tion-even the mo
or is used as a ba
47 Fremde Szenen stem

the ballet score Tutugu
atavistic music.
390
This overlapping can be seen in a sixty-five-bar block of repeated triplet (mostly)
shapes in the piano, generated primarily from the triplet patterns used in accompani-
ments to the second-subject material, and yet also showing traces of the first-subject
accompaniment. Example 3 shows a passage from this section that contains nothing but
repeated Ds in the piano, heard initially under sustained A flats in the strings. This
hammering changes into units of four semiquavers and drops down to pp (b. 259) for a
strident dotted figure in the strings (opening on a G minor triad), which works harmon-
ically both with and against the piano, creating the effect of two not completely syn-
chronized processes. (This dotted figure is further developed in bars 55 and 95 of Fremde
Szene III.) In general, the effect of this incessant repetition is to weaken tonal implica-
tions, not only in this instance but also in passages elsewhere in Fremde Szenen: at bar 125
in Fremde Szene I, for example, an A minor triad is stridently played for nearly seven bars
before the harmony is eventually blurred. However, perhaps the most extreme instance
of this recoding of tonal function in Rihm's oeuvre occurs in Klavierstiick No. 7 (1980),
where the most 'dissonant' passage in the piece comprises obsessively repeated (mainly
E flat) triads (bb. 176-82).
The recapitulation contains a three-bar section (see Ex. 4) controlled by instructions
that seem both to capture and to exceed the sense of excess already present in Schumann:48
'Insgesamt 5x. Jede weitere Wiederholung: Immer rastloser' (Five times altogether.
Each further repetition increasingly restless).49 The first two bars of the passage are rem-
iniscent of the second subject's three descending tones, and the accompaniment of the
last bar is derived from the first subject, which makes the passage like a small recapitula-
tion in its own right. It crescendos from pp toffand the bass ascends from C step by step
to an octave (b. 373), leading with increasing intensity to the sonic climax of the piece.
Despite this voice-leading, however, in another sense this passage brings two types of
musical object into close proximity more than it reconciles first and second subjects in
any conventional manner. Shortly afterwards (b. 387), the process is repeated, with
changes, leading to a passage (b. 398) designed to make the physical presence of the
players very much part of the music, not least through its marking: 'mit aller Kraft und
verzweifeltem Schwung' (with full power and desperate drive).
The voice of Schumann is at its strongest in Fremde Szene II, and yet material is shared
across the three strongly characterized pieces. Most notably, the arpeggiated accompa-
nying figure found in Exx. I and 4 also occurs in Fremde Szene I (bb. 136-41) and in
Fremde Szene III (bb. 107-11, the 'schwankend' passage). In these cases the E7 figure is
present, but the most consistent feature is the arpeggiated seventh chords linked by sem-
itone movement in the bass; and while the return of this material late in Fremde Szene III
(bb. 119-22) has a conclusive feel to it by virtue of its position, it is also true that this
figure continues to function as an object to be manipulated, rather than as a germ to be
developed. The fragment principle is certainly prevalent in Fremde Szenen I and III, as
evinced by the successions of triplets, dotted rhythms, and trills, which serve to harden
Schumann's gestures.
48 Frisius also draws attention to this passage; 'Tradition(s)-Impulse(s) of Compositional Freedom', 10.
49 This tempo marking, and the resulting restlessness, is reminiscent of passages in the G minor sonata, Op. 22, where
Schumann asks for an increased tempo when the music appears already to be at its limit. The first movement is marked
'So rasch wie mjglich', while the coda is marked 'Schneller' and then 'Noch Schneller'. The syncopated version of the
descending three-note figure of the first subject in the 'Noch schneller' section could, arguably, be related to Rihm's
descending, syncopated three-note figure. Schumann's Rondo, meanwhile, accelerates from 'Presto' to a quasi Cadenza
marked 'Prestissimo' and is finally marked 'Immer schneller und schneller' in the final race for the cadence. I am grateful
to Hermann Danuser for drawing my attention to this sonata.
391
Ex. 3. Fremde Szene II, bb. 251-60. C 1983 by Universal Edition a.g. Wien/ue 18108. Reproduced
by permission.
(accel.)-- _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _- a tempo sehr schnell
256
(accel.) ._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ a tempo sehr schnell
f f a(liegend) (1) (2)
(3) 4 - "F- " I5 p - - - - - - - - (
(j45parc.
(3) (4) (5) ppsub. kahlundkalt (1) (2)
--('.) A
As noted e
1980s, com
For Rihm t
different co
and meanin
painting: 'T
the sign.'50
Edgard Var
speaks of h
on the who
sound."' Th
50 'Musikalische
51 Rihm, 'Chiff
(1985), ibid. 34
392
Ex. 4. Fremde Szene II, bb. 370-2. ? 1983 by Universal Editions, a.g., Wien/ue 18108. Reproduced
by permission.
Insgesamt 5x
Jede weitere Wiederholung:
370 Immer rastloser
Insgesamt 5x
Jede weitere Wiederholung:
Immer rastloser
372 x
__ __ _ - --- if 6, , /
Sflk iff
-if
f - p
~Ix4
372x4
x4
with a sculpted physical presen

(1987-91).52
In the context of Fremde Szen
idea of Schumann's gestures
writes of the piano in Chiffre
script, leaving wounds, signs',
52 For more on this score, see my 'Voices o

of the Royal Musical Association, 129 (2004),
393
Fremde Szenen.53 For in Chiffre I the piano frequently functions as an object moving, often
in intensively repetitive patterns, against the rest of the ensemble. Something compara-
ble happens in the passage quoted in Ex. 3 from Fremde Szene II: when the piano ham-
mers away across the string textures, it too seems to engrave its own space, presenting
itself as an object in its own right not wholly at the mercy of its harmonic function.
Moreover, Rihm hints at the meaning of this cipher when he writes 'sub. kahl und kalt'
(bare and cold) in the piano, bar 259. Deployed in this manner, then, aspects of Schumann's
writing function as sound objects in ways that relate to but greatly expand the type of
organization used by Schumann.
INTERTEXTUALITY
Rihm's music is so obviously concerned with associations of moo

monic procedures are so clearly referential that it demands inte
practice. When off-beat textures become violent interjections, for
be understood at a level that considers not only Rihm's wider co
but also his understanding of modernism, since at a purely form
incomprehensible. This music is not a neoclassical reworking
indeed Rihm links neoclassicism with serialist composition, and
essentially conservative.54 Nor is this music principally nostalgic
strangeness of Schumann as much as his familiarity. It might be hear
the extent that Schumann's gestures are often detached from their st
ever, it does more than unpick Schumann because it uses the abu
gestures-even detached from their standard contexts-as a source
Furthermore, this score is neither an example of post-canonic
violent moments, nor of ironic pluralism, since materials are depl
tional investment instead of just being butted together in an am
Rihm is anxious to convey that his music is not characterized by
In short, a stereotyped postmodernist surface of unmoored simula
ing but one another, is not to be found here. Instead of pressin
Rihm's approach deploys the expressive latency of Schumann, w
stylistic elements so that they are more suggestive of modernism
If what Harold Bloom dubs an anxiety of influence is at work h
tion to the preceding modernist generation than to Schumann.
little doubt that Rihm is ambitious and seeks to distinguish himself f
modernism (and while he deliberately evokes tradition as a father
maschine), Fremde Szene II is not about overcoming Schumann; it is ab
with him, since even the most distorted moments in this music
destructive. When, however, Bloom's understanding of tradition
of intertextuality and intersubjectivity, it becomes clear that R
both Schumann and modernism are very much part of a wider
that expands more than it rejects the achievements of high moder
The consequence is that Fremde Szenen not only blurs any easy
modernism and postmodernism, but it also contributes to our kn
and of late twentieth-century subjectivity in ways that are not e
his music expressed from the perspective of Rihm's interest in vis
53 Rihm, 'Chifre Ifuir Klavier und sieben Instrumente' (1983), in Ausgesprochen, ii. 328.
5 Rihm, 'Moderne als Klassizismus' (1996), in Ausgesprochen, i. 426-9 at 429. The term
komponieren', meaning composing with bits taken from somewhere else. This article also
(ed.), Die klassizistische Moderne in der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts (Mainz, 1997), 303-35.
55 'Lber Dis-Kontur Notizen zu einem Vortrag', in Ausgesprochen, ii. 291-6 at 293.
394
are might be said to paint a layer over Schumann and simultaneously to modify the
underlying surface, creating myriad perspectives for listeners and performers.
SUBJECTIVITY
Alongside such ideas we need to bear in mind the deserted rooms that Rihm discusses
'freely formed and abrupt conventions', he says, 'stand together as if in a hurriedly and
restlessly furnished interior-the residence of last choice'."5 The creative paradox Rihm
unfolds in this music and in his writing about it is that, on the one hand, he rearrange
furniture in abandoned rooms, and on the other, he tries to capture the swaying subjec
tivity of Schumann. Put differently, he connects with the subjectivity of the material, yet
reconfigures its meaning by working with sound objects. In this way, Rihm wants simu
taneously to experience Schumann as a distant figure and to tap that traditional
Romantic sense of emotion flowing from the inside to the outside with as little interfer
ence as possible.
Susan McClary suggests that, unlike nineteenth-century German music which con-
veys narrative through the changed interior state of the subjectivity it projects, John
Zorn's Spillane (1986) conveys its hard-boiled detective theme by creating a sonic land
scape for its protagonist-in the manner of a film score-while allowing him a littl
reflective interiority at the end of the piece."57 Perhaps some of the instability and excite-
ment of Fremde Szenen derives from Rihm's simultaneous deployment of both these
modes of subjectivity. For the music not only captures the interior sensibility of Schumann
and his age, it also functions in some ways as an unfamiliar soundscape through which
modern subject can wander. This mingling of inner self and outward environment is at
one with Hans-Georg Gadamer's suggestion that consciousness and immediacy ar
always already among things because they are constantly embedded in historical hori
zons.58 Similarly, Rihm's fusion of historical horizons creates a sense of an inner self that
is nevertheless very much among things.
However, this inner voice is far from straightforward because even though Rihm
reinforces the nineteenth-century idea of internal subjectivity, he also undercuts its sta
bility by linking it to something other than one's normal self. This becomes clear when
he comments: 'But I hear Schumann as a composer who when he writes music always
writes other music. One who writes music of an entirely other sort, which comes from the
body, from beating.'59 Appropriately, Rihm also speaks appreciatively of Roland
Barthes's essay 'Rasch', where Barthes hears what he describes as a 'body that beats' in
Schumann's Kreisleriana;60 and by doing so awakens, one might say, the author he once
famously murdered, who returns not as the source of unified intention but as a body
within the music.61 In relation to Rihm's concerns, this somatics describes immediacy
while enabling access to a subject position that is not entirely knowable because it works
at a pre-symbolic level. Thus what Rihm seems to hear in Schumann, what he call
other, is a somatic presence that exerts pressure on the musical style in which Schumann
56 Rihm, 'Fremde Blatter', in Ausgesprochen, i. 233.

57 Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content ofMusical Form (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000) 146-7.
58 This paraphrases a statement by Gadamer about phenomenology that is quoted and discussed by Bowie, From
Romanticism to Critical Theoy, 154.
59 Rihm, 'Auch iber Robert Schumann', in Ausgesprochen, i. 235.
60 Roland Barthes, 'Rasch', in The Responsibility of Forms (1982), trans. R. Howard (Oxford, 1985), 299-312 at 299
This essay is quoted in A Thousand Plateaus, which also includes several further references to the idea of a dispersed subjec
tivity in Schumann. Gilles Deleuze and Fdlix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1988), 297-8.
61 For more on the return of agency in Barthes, see Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalsis
and Cinema (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), 189.
395
works. So when Rihm talks about music as the inner foreign land, it is likely that he is
speaking about a gestural form of subjectivity that music can access. Moreover, by
emphasizing music as a medium that is not reducible to propositional rationality,
Rihm's thinking is attuned to a German aesthetic tradition sympathetic to a non-cognitive
stratum of subjectivity."62
Rihm is clearly interested in exploring music as a medium of somatic subjectivity.
Speaking of his Vers une symphoniefleuve IV (1997-8), he comments: 'Let us think of music
in the shape of a river, as the forward movement of sound substance, as emotion in
form-they're all just attempts at putting in words the most inexplicable: that music has
no body and yet has movement.'6 Even though this sentence was written in the specific
context of a later piece in which a sense of musical flow is crucial, the way it links bodily
motion to musical movement has relevance to the current discussion. Leaving aside the
miming of nature, Rihm's question can be reformulated as follows: how could music, a
disembodied medium, apparently have the characteristics of an embodied human sub-
jectivity? While there is indeed an inexplicable element to this question, it is also pos-
sible to provide some answers. Music is able to enact modes of subjectivity because it
utilizes learnt associations between sound and movement; consequently, notation pro-
vides instructions for performance derived from traces of previous performances.64 In a
discussion of J. S. Bach's 'Erbarme Dich' Naomi Cummings provides some help in
understanding this linkage when she comments: 'a musical "subject" can emerge in
time as an integration of various "subjectivities" in the work. Any attributions to music
of qualities that would normally be applied to living beings, such as locality, gesture, or
volition, indicate that subjective content has been heard.'"6 This view usefully indicates
how musical subjectivities are assembled from a range of characteristics (to which one
can add 'movement') normally associated with living beings. Even if the subjectivities of
Fremde Szenen do not gel in quite the same way as those found in 'Erbarme Dich', they
do, nevertheless, offer an encoding of bodily movement to which both performers and
listeners can respond with their own forms of mobility.
Music is an invitation to subjectivity: it participates in the construction of subjectivity
by allowing us to inhabit it with our bodies and to experience something beyond the
confines of ourselves.66 Thus when we interact with music we are asked to occupy a sub-
ject position, or, put more precisely, we are interpellated by a subject position to which
we can respond by means of identification, dialogue, or rejection." With his Schumann
pieces, Rihm seems to be invoking that process, showing himself to be interpellated as a
composer, and answering that call of the other. His response is a dialogical one in which
both he and Schumann are modified; and the process does not stop at his reactions
because performers and listeners are also part of the dialogue, both bringing to bear
62 When this lineage finds its way into Adorno's aesthetics of music, it is expressed in terms of a dialectic between
musical rationality and a more instinctive part of ourselves. Therefore, even though his spatial approach to composition
is not particularly Adornian, Rihm's sense, as found in his essay 'Musikalische Freiheit', that a non-symbolic aspect of
subjectivity emerges through immersion in musical material is more compatible with Adornian aesthetics than it might at
first appear.
63 Rihm, Vers une symphoniefleuve IV (1998), trans. Robert Lindell, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival pro-
gramme book, 2000, 31.
64 For more on the enactment of social relationships in music, see Nicholas Cook, 'Music as Performance', in Martin
Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music (New York and London: Routledge,
2003), 204-14, although I have not used the idea in quite the same way.
65 Naomi Cummings, 'The Subjectivities of "Erbarme Dich"', Music Anaysis, 16 (1997), 5-44 at 11-12.
66 For more on the idea of inviting subjectivity, see Lawrence Kramer, 'The Mysteries of Animation: History, Analysis
and Musical Subjectivity', Music Analysis, 20 (2001), 153-78 at 157.
67 For a discussion of subject position in a different context, see Eric F. Clarke, 'Subject-Position and the Specification
of Invariants in Music by Frank Zappa and P.J. Harvey', Music Analysis, 18 (1999), 347-74.
396
their own somatic experiences on the swaying subjectivity of the music. By combining a
nineteenth-century notion of inner emotion with an intertextual model of subjectivity,
these pieces fruitfully bring into contact two differing notions of self. They indicate that
self is better conveyed as a continual negotiation between the poles of centred and
decentred subjectivity than as one or the other, or indeed as a cosy compromise
between the two.
Approached like this, it becomes appropriate to appreciate Rihm's music, and the
subjectivity it embodies, as shifting intersections of various components. These include
the estranged perceptions of deserted rooms and rearranged furniture, the more direct
somatic dimension, and the nineteenth-century idea of inner subjectivity. The result is
an active exploration of the ways in which inner feeling is semiotically encoded, and,
conversely, a manifestation of the ways in which individual consciousness can modify
existing meanings. In other words, these Schumann-derived pieces demonstrate that
there is no 'definitive line between what our minds contribute and what the world con-
tributes to our experience'.68
The flow of this music suggests that the future and the past can intersect on multiple
horizons by placing the familiar and the unfamiliar in a dialogue capable of turning the
one into the other. These pieces enact ways of simultaneously inhabiting and transform-
ing historical material, without drawing a rigid boundary between these states, like a
form of criticism that modifies its object in the process of understanding. Arguably, all
music does this; however, the significance of Rihm's pieces is that, by amplifying this
process, they draw attention to a dimension that is not normally so evident. By combin-
ing a sense of identity with constantly shifting perspectives, they encourage sensitivity to
intersections of the past and the present in music that embeds such processes in less evi-
dent ways. Nevertheless, these pieces are distinctive because they not only sound like
Schumann, they also sound like Rihm: they feel like Rihm speaking in another language
yet without losing his own musical voice. It is as if the material has become aware of the
discontinuities and interruptions of its own hermeneutic horizons.69
ABSTRACT
Fremde Szenen I-III (1982-4) is a set of piano trios by Wolfgang Rihm

leading contemporary composers. Inspired by Robert Schumann, thes
the swaying fluidity of his musical sensibility as a memory and as a
They immediately pose questions for anyone familiar with the tradit
Rihm's music. What does it mean at the end of the twentieth cen
Schumann-inspired music? What does this music say about modernism
nostalgic? And how is subjectivity conveyed in this music?
By combining a nineteenth-century notion of inner emotion with
model of subjectivity, these pieces fruitfully bring into contact two di
self. Moreover, they enact ways of simultaneously inhabiting and trans
material, without drawing a rigid boundary between these states, like a
that modifies its object in the process of understanding.
68 For this paraphrase of Friedrich Schleiermacher, see Bowie, 'Music and the Rise of Aestheti
69 For an Adornian take on Gadamer's interpretative horizons, see Bowie, From Romanticism to Crit
397

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Swaying with Schumann: Subjectivity and Tradition in Wolfgang Rihm's 'Fremde Szenen'

I-III and Related Scores

SWAYING WITH SCHUMANN: SUBJECTIVITY AND

WOLFGANG RI HM'S Fremde Szenen I-III (1982-4), a set of piano trios, de

RIHM AND TRADITION

The string of performances and premieres that took place in the

LAYERS AND EVENTS

The term 'Chiffre' (cipher) occurs so frequently when Rihm write

20 Rihm, 'Musikalische Freiheit', in Ausgesprochen, i. 26; Offene Enden, 56-7.

24 Rihm, 'Musikalische Freiheit', in Ausgesprochen, i. 34, and Offene Enden, 68.

RIHM AND SCHUMANN

There are a number of parallels between Rihm and Schumann. First

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52 For more on this score, see my 'Voices o

Rihm's music is so obviously concerned with associations of moo

56 Rihm, 'Fremde Blatter', in Ausgesprochen, i. 233.

Fremde Szenen I-III (1982-4) is a set of piano trios by Wolfgang Rihm

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