The role of the artist

RODERIC DUNNETT visits Caen for a performance of
Wolfgang Rihm's opera 'Jakob Lenz'

With six operas, (perhaps surprisingly) three symphonies -- all composed before he was 24 -- and a host of orchestral (Gesungene Zeit - for Anne-Sophie Mutter, Deus Passus - St Luke Passion), chamber (nearly ten string quartets) and stage works (Die Eroberung von Mexico, Oedipus) to his credit, plus settings of Novalis, Hölderlin, Nietzsche and Celan, Wolfgang Rihm (born 1952) has been at the cutting edge of Austro-German music since his early twenties.

Opera de Caen's bold decision to stage his early chamber opera Jakob Lenz, one of the works with which the Karlsruhe-born composer made his name as a pioneer of the avant-garde both in, and beyond, Darmstadt (where Rihm, who acknowledges Webern, Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Morton Feldman among his major influences, studied in the 1970s and has since been a regular lecturer), paid off handsomely, as was evidenced by the vociferous and spontaneous applause with which it was greeted.

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