Becoming and Disintegration in Wolfgang Rihm’s Fifth String Quartet, Ohne Titel

Abstract

Wolfgang Rihm’s Fifth String Quartet poses numerous challenges to analysis because it contains little repeated material, no clear formal design, and contains a wealth of diverse musical gestures. I argue that the piece’s gestures should be understood in relation to an idealized Austro-German romantic music, common to much of Rihm’s work from the 1970s, but which fails to materialize in the Fifth Quartet. I trace the piece’s closeness to romanticism and demonstrate how the piece’s unpredictable formal process produces a large-scale gestural contour composed of smaller processes. I call processes directed toward romanticism, “becoming,” and those directed away from it, “disintegrating.” After surveying several noteworthy passages, I examine the quartet’s large-scale form. I conclude with a brief meditation on the relationship between Rihm’s aesthetics and German romanticism and the post-modernism of the 1970s and 1980s, and argue that Rihm’s music fulfills the demands of romantic theorists from the early 19th century, forming a new strain of romanticism built atop the ruined memories of the old.