I worked for and with Wolfgang Rihm between 1992 and 2007, the fifteen and a half years I spent in the promotion department of Universal Edition, Vienna. I got to know him in a wide range of situations: visiting him in his spacious apartment in Karlsruhe, where he showed me the score he was currently working on, comparing it to the previous one, which was derived from the same root; listening to some of his earlier pieces he himself had not heard for some time (he was pleasantly surprised by one and was sensitive enough to detect my uneasiness caused by the other, stopping the machine without a moment’s hesitation). On another occasion, he attended a performance of his La lugubre gondola/Das Eismeer, a work for two pianos and orchestra. The title is of course a reference to Franz Liszt’s eponymous piano piece and the painting by Caspar David Friedrich. He was visibly moved, even upset by the piece. If I remember correctly at a distance of seventeen years, he described it as a requiem; walking with him in the streets near the Salzburg Festspielhaus prior to the world premiere of a cello concerto (he was extremely nervous and worried, for the conductor did not seem to have an antenna for his music—in the end, the performance was a triumph. However, I experienced at the closest possible range the extent to which a composer is helpless once he has dispatched his score on its way); addressing a public before a concert (Rihm is a superb speaker, his mastery of the German language and of course his tremendous intellect make sure he puts his message across lucidly), giving an interview (we only did one, at the very beginning of our work together—his sentences were print-ready); at the prize-giving ceremony in Munich where the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize was awarded to Wolfgang Rihm (in his tribute, the speaker addressed a question that is raised time and again in connection with the composer: his awe- and suspicion-inspiring prolificacy. The speaker recalled Luigi Nono’s admonition: “Wolfgang, you need a crisis!”