ABSTRACT
Even in Todesfuge's dark vision of music as a seminal agency in Germany's wartime atrocities, echoes of a different conception can be discerned: music as a token not of hope, but of resistance beyond hope. Music, in other words, may serve as an affirmative image of poetry only to the extent that it is cast as the practice of interhuman communication and remembrance. One of the most widely known poems from Celan's late work, 'Fadensonnen', explicitly foregrounds this lack and thus puts poetic musicality at stake in a singularly effective way. Beside 'Todesfuge', it is also the one most often set to music, a fact doubtless related to its overt involvement of music and poetry in a reciprocal act of meta-reflection. Josef Hausler has characterized Rihm as 'a leading figure in the reorientation of German music in the 1970s increasingly away from exclusively structuralist concerns towards expressive immediacy and historical allusion'.
