Wolfgang Rihm

Wolfgang Rihm, born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1952, arrived in the 1970s as a young composer pushing against the strict, system-driven avant-garde of the postwar years. His teachers included Karlheinz Stockhausen and Klaus Huber, but his instinct ran toward raw, direct expression, music that sounds written in the heat of the moment, and he became a central figure in what critics called a return to expressive immediacy.

He stayed rooted in Karlsruhe, teaching composition for decades at the music academy there, and wrote at an almost unmanageable pace: a catalogue of hundreds of works spanning orchestral music, string quartets, songs, and operas, including the chamber opera Jakob Lenz, about a poet's mental collapse.

His orchestral music is the most direct way in: pick a recent recording of one of his orchestral works and listen for the sudden swings between violence and stillness that mark his voice.