At the suggestion of its then chief conductor Hans Zender, Saarländischer Rundfunk asked several composers to bring music from the period before Monteverdi into the concert hall. Riehm first wanted to design a “musical sociogram” confronting the official music of church and court with that of the travelling minstrels, but their music was never written down. In a publication by Willi Apel he found pieces from around 1380 by composers between Guillaume de Machaut and Guillaume Dufay who cultivated a refined, “manneristic” style for the court of the antipopes in Avignon and similar courts. For “He, très doulz roussignol joly” he chose five pieces by Matheus de Perusio, Borlet, Grimace, Johannes Ciconia and an anonymous composer.
Riehm keeps strictly to the originals, adds no notes apart from trills and ornaments and hardly interferes with the polyphony. Instead of instrumentation he speaks of “instrumental staging”: the dramaturgy follows the image of a courtly soirée at which the “ghosts of Avignon” meet for a late rendezvous. In the three-part ballade “Ung lion say”, small sections of the voices appear in characters modelled on Couperin’s harpsichord music, capricious, cool or uncouth; in the virelai “Alarme, alarme” a cuckoo-call phrase at first enlivens tempo and scoring, until the music remains heavily on the ground.
“Schubert Teilelager” (1989) for string orchestra, as Frank Hilberg writes in the booklet, draws on deconstructionist methods. Riehm takes a few figures from the piano accompaniment of Franz Schubert’s song “Der blinde Knabe” D 833 and reassembles them; the melody is omitted, the accompaniment becomes the theme, and layering, overlapping and staggered dynamics create an interplay of near and far. Romantic feeling, Riehm writes, can today only be experienced as the telling of worn-out hopes, in the “cynical present of the Federal Republic” and not in Metternich’s Vienna.
Riehm wrote “Leonce und und …”, his very first orchestral composition, in 1966 as a scene from an opera after Georg Büchner’s “Leonce und Lena” that was never completed: in the garden at night, Leonce falls into a delirious spiral at the sight of Lena until Valerio brings him back down to earth, a reality embodied by Bach’s five-part Fugue in B flat minor from Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier. For a commission from Saarländischer Rundfunk, Riehm in 1999 placed before it a new paraphrase on the corresponding prelude, “Garden. Night and moonlight”, after Büchner’s stage direction, in which the stage gradually fills from a frame of compressed melodic fragments to Bach’s perspective. The title comes from a line of Leonce’s: “Die Erde ist eine Schale von dunkelm Gold” (the earth is a dark gold chalice).
Riehm studied composition with Wolfgang Fortner and taught at the Musikhochschule in Frankfurt am Main from 1974 to 2000. The recordings come from radio: the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken under Hans Zender recorded “He, très doulz roussignol joly” in Saarbrücken in 1979, the Ensemble Oriol under Sebastian Gottschick “Schubert Teilelager” in a WDR production in 1990. The Bach paraphrases with Ksenija Lukic (soprano), Christoph Späth (tenor), Yaron Windmüller (baritone) and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken under Oswald Sallaberger were recorded live in 1999 in the Großer Sendesaal of Saarländischer Rundfunk.