In my professional life, I met Peter Ruzicka in his various capacities as intendant and artistic director: of the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (it must have been soon after his appointment in 1979, at the age of thirty-one), of the Hamburg State Opera House, the Munich Biennale, and the Salzburg Festival.

He is the most reserved person I have ever met, a characteristic which made promotion not exactly easy. However, Ruzicka is also one of the most important patrons of new music; in all his positions, he has commissioned (he is still artistic director of the Munich Biennale) a large number of new compositions. What particularly impressed me and filled me with gratitude was the tremendous support he gave to his colleagues, especially the younger ones who were writing chamber operas for his festival in Munich. I read several of his e-mails, which are paragons of empathy: he could put composers at ease, who may have been having a minor crisis delaying the delivery of the score on time, by saying how wonderful he found their music and how much faith he put in the opera in gestation. At the party following the world premiere, he would extol the composer and the production team with words of heartwarming praise. All of this was tremendously admirable and in striking contrast to the shield he would hold up to protect himself in private communication.

In 2009, Peter Ruzicka reread the text he had written in answer to my three questions. He remarked it was now rather distant but he accepted it as a document of his views as expressed nearly thirty years ago.

I.

I have also had a similar spontaneous revelation. It happened in the autumn of 1971: in a late-night radio broadcast, I heard a new orchestral work by Helmut Lachenmann and it became clear to me straight away that it represented a new aesthetic ideal which would have a bearing on my work as well. That composition was Kontrakadenz, one of the major (and least-known) works of new music.

In that piece, Lachenmann had rid himself of the paraphernalia and expressive residues of “tonal hearing” in the broadest sense of the word. Tonality here means the traditional aesthetic middle course, an unencumbered and unencumbering protected position in the middle of a highly differentiated field of tension.