Wolfgang Rihm was awarded the Ruby Festival Pin in Salzburg on Friday. The director of the Salzburg Festival, Markus Hinterhäuser, presented the composer with this honor. The Salzburg Festival is paying homage to Rihm on his 70th birthday – with the instrumentally connected passion motets Vigilia, the ten-part cipher cycle and the chamber opera Jakob Lenz.
Hinterhäuser paid tribute to the composer’s oeuvre. “Wolfgang Rihm has been inextricably linked to the Salzburg Festival for 40 years. His works have become an important, essential part of the festival landscape almost every summer.”
For Wolfgang Rihm, art never takes place in spaces that are free of history. However, it is always more than a sounding board for events. “Art and culture, both are an essential contribution to the education of the heart. That’s where Wolfgang Rihm’s music leads us,” said the director.
“His music opens up to the listener,” said laudator Eleonore Büning. “She shuts herself off from the traditional cutlery of musical analysis. He himself says: ‘I want to write music that cannot be explained with conventional terms’.”
A work by Wolfgang Rihm was heard for the first time at the Salzburg Festival in 1982 with the premiere of “Fremde Scene”. Further premieres of the works “My Death. Requiem in memoriam Jane S.” followed. in 1990, Lavant-Gesänge 2003, the concerto for cello and orchestra commissioned by the Salzburg Festival in 2006, Dionysos 2010 and the second piano concerto, also commissioned by the Salzburg Festival, the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra Washington in 2014.
Since 2019, Rihm’s works have been an integral part of the Overture spiritual at the Salzburg Festival. In 1991 Wolfgang Rihm gave his Salzburg Festival speech entitled “What does music say?”.
The Festival Pin with Ruby has already been awarded to Edith Clever, Christa Ludwig, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Christian Stückl, Jürgen Flimm, Riccardo Muti, Mariss Jansons, Daniel Barenboim, Franz Welser-Möst and Tobias Moretti.