Wolfgang Rihm
“Transitus III”

Wolfgang Rihm’s orchestral work Transitus III was premiered in 2019 by the Munich Philharmonic to mark the 125th anniversary of the orchestra’s founding. The preceding composition, Transitus, had its first performance five years earlier in Milan, commemorating the 150th birthday of Richard Strauss – the middle piece the composer had apparently planned now remains an unfillable gap following Rihm’s death. Wolfgang Rihm described his interest in Strauss’s musical language in connection with both Transitus works. The virtuosity of orchestration, for which Strauss is often celebrated, is, he said, “not a value in itself”; rather, he asserted: “Only its energetic charge and the flow it sets in motion determine the quality of a musical work. At its best, Strauss’s music has an incomparable pull of ceaseless motion.”

This notion is also reflected in the idea of musical transition, which is one way to translate the Latin word Transitus. It may be understood as a reference to Richard Wagner’s concept of the “endless melody” and to the continuous, single-movement tone poems of Richard Strauss. The titles of other Rihm works – such as Vers une symphonie fleuve or Verwandlung – similarly evoke elements and processes that define the structure and dramaturgy of his music. The composer’s tendency towards multi-part cycles serves an ideal: the idea of “working on a single piece only”, of which the individual works are, so to speak, segments or excerpts.

Transitus III opens with a striking gesture: the strings first intone an ascending, then a descending motif. This is followed by a soundscape of muted brass tones, rising lines from the flutes, and fragmentary interjections by a solo violin, before the opening motif returns with determination. Timpani strokes and fanfare-like trumpet figures mark an initial dynamic climax. One especially impressive moment occurs halfway through the approximately 20-minute work: here, the percussion – which had already made its presence felt in the background – imposes strict 4/4 time on the musical flow. Towards the end, a tremendous surge of energy propels the music from a meditative passage, shaped by sonic beauty and melodic figuration in the violins, into a sudden fortissimo within seconds.

Transitions and transformations: in Wolfgang Rihm’s musical thinking, previously dominant elements blend with new ones that gradually come to the fore. Equally, momentary energetic discharges can punctuate the musical narrative. The interplay between passivity and activity, between surrender to involuntary intuition and deliberate intervention, was described by Wolfgang Rihm as follows: “The work structures itself, and I must be sensitive enough to record its autonomous movement like a seismograph. Not by submitting to the process, but by tending to it like a gardener.”