Wolfgang Rihm, born in Karlsruhe in 1952, was already writing string quartets at the age of 14, 15 and 16, but did not publish them. Only in 1970 did his String Quartet No. 1 Op. 2 appear. It is close to the idiom of the Second Viennese School, follows its twelve-tone thinking, favours sevenths, ninths and tritones in partly thinned-out lines and then suddenly collapses: “as if suddenly destroyed: fade out” is written above bar 109 of the score. Tense fermatas, a hesitant echo and a final chord that briefly rears up follow. Rihm studied with Eugen Werner Velte, Wolfgang Fortner, Humphrey Searle, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Klaus Huber and taught composition at the Karlsruhe Musikhochschule from 1985.
In the winter of 1980/81 Rihm composed his String Quartet No. 4 in three movements. He called it “at once a straggler and a harbinger”: on the one hand it condenses the confrontation with tradition that had shaped the first three quartets and recalls late Beethoven quartets, Mahler, Schostakowitsch and Janacek’s Second Quartet “Intimate Letters”. On the other hand it anticipates what was to come: the first bar of the String Quartet No. 8 takes up the softly bouncing final repetitions of viola and cello from the Fourth, and the Quartets V to VII also draw on it. Stefan Fricke, author of the booklet text, sees it not as a mere transitional work but as a coherent and stirring piece in its own right.
The String Quartet No. 5 “ohne Titel” begins with a long-held F sharp, and the Sixth and Seventh Quartets also start on the same note; Rihm himself once described the three as a single quartet. In the Fifth the music is a rapid, often shimmering chain reaction that breaks off, starts again and continues elsewhere. Rihm originally intended to give the String Quartet No. 8 (1987/88) the title “Zeichnungen, Seiten” (drawings, pages): in some passages the players scratch the notes with the tip of the bow, strike the music paper or “write” on it. By the standards of Rihm’s output the quartet explores the instruments’ range of sound in an unusually experimental way; the text, Rihm said, comes into being through the noise of its production.
Frank de Groot, Laurens van Vliet, Karin Dolman and Hans Woudenberg of the DoelenKwartet recorded the quartets in close collaboration with the composer; the impulse came from a meeting with Rihm at the Prime Festival in Groningen in September 2001. The Rotterdam quartet has some 250 mostly contemporary works in its repertoire and has worked with composers such as Henri Dutilleux, Steve Reich and Peter-Jan Wagemans. The recordings were made in May and June 2005 in the Old Catholic Church in Delft, with the support of the ThuisKopie Fonds. ClassicsToday.com gave the SACD its 10/10 Award, Luister its Luister10 Award.