“Everything He Touched Became Rihm”

The composer Wolfgang Rihm died on the night of July 27 at the age of 72. His friend, the Swiss composer Dieter Ammann, was in close contact with him until close to the very end. 

The two artists have known each other for nearly 30 years. Rihm once described Ammann’s music as “never idle, always alive, and in the most beautiful sense overgrown with powerful lines—lines that remain powerful and uninterrupted even when they are heading in opposite directions.” But Ammann  emphasized that Rihm was, in a way, describing his own music with that sentence too; The two men were friends but also aesthetic comrades. We exchanged emails and texts on Rihm before meeting on Zoom to talk about the composer’s final days, his “gut level” approach to composition, and the way his oeuvre reflects his personality.