Georg Büchner nel secolo delle avanguardie: un focus sullo Jakob Lenz di Wolfgang Rihm

Starting from historical premises and from a necessary attention to the dramaturgical meaning of Büchner’s works, we want re-discuss their critical reception from the last years of the 19th century, to 1900s and the avant-gardes, until the 1970s. Not forgetting the musicological aim, beside the first Wozzeck and the mention to other musical works, this article aspires to observe the musical dramaturgy of the most important score of the second half of the 20th century inspired by Büchner: Wolfgand Rihm’s Jakob Lenz (1977), a chamber opera on libretto by Michael Fröhling, based on Büchner’s Lenz (a short story inspired by Jakob Lenz, a Stürmer poet who died in Moscow after the fatal degeneration of a psychic crisis). Rihm has always been fascinated by the works of some of the most controversial writers such as Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Artaud, and is characterized by a peculiar poetic, opposite, in a sense, to the one of the avant-gardes. Rihm’s Jakob Lenz offers the chance to investigate the way in which a text from the 1830s meets the musical language, after the second wave of avant-gardes, to become an Opera: an “uncommon” form of art despite the partial and progressive renewed interest of the contemporary composers. Büchner’s work, almost ignored until the end of the 19th century, keeps on revealing its attitude to always evoking and stimulating new rereadings and reinterpretations.