Wolfgang Rihm often deals with musical history as material – his own works included – using a series of techniques and strategies. Adopting the technique of overpainting, confronting the German-Austrian tradition from J.S. Bach to the Second Vienna School through stylistic borrowings rather than actual quotes, and playing with musical ciphers, Rihm activates and decodes history. The past appears as fragments, but in Rihm’s later works, these fragments are swept away in an unstoppable flow.

Since the 1990s, Rihm’s treatment of the fragment diverges clearly from Romantic and modernist sensibilities, represented by, for instance, Robert Schumann’s song and piano cycles and György Kurtág’s fractured material. During the two last decades, the flow has been a salient feature of Rihm’s works, and the most divergent materials can appear in this inclusive flow.

Rihm’s transgressive treatment of the two seemingly opposite phenomena ‘fragment’ and ‘flow’ is never more apparent than in his ‘opera fantasy’ Dionysos (2009–2010). His starting point is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Dionysos-Dithyramben: he has rearranged and mixed textual fragments from the poems, but he has also turned to Nietzsche’s notebooks from the 1880s, that stockpile of fragments. The dismembering of bodies and the staging of a deteriorating mind enhances the process of fragmentation. These fragments lose their character of being fractured due to a musical flow that is in itself patently heterogeneous.

In this article, I elucidate the relation between the poles of fragment and flow, characterized not by tension, but by attraction. In the same way as with the Romantic and the modernist fragment, Rihm’s flowing fragments can be seen as paradigmatic of a specific period of history, our contemporary liquid culture.