BERLIN.- Wolfgang Rihm, a composer whose forceful, shape-shifting output reinvigorated contemporary classical music, died Saturday in Ettlingen, Germany. He was 72.

His death, in a hospice outside the city of Karlsruhe, where he lived, was announced in a statement by his publisher, Universal Edition. It did not specify a cause, but Rihm had been treated for cancer since 2017. His illness and his efforts to compose despite it were the subject of a 2020 German documentary.

Rihm was considered one of the most original and prolific musical voices in Europe and the most performed German composer of contemporary classical music. Among his prominent commissions was “Reminiszenz,” an “arresting, broody orchestral song cycle,” as Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim described it in The New York Times. The work, for a tenor and large orchestra, premiered at the 2017 opening of the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, Germany.

Rihm composed more than 500 works, though the exact number remains unclear because some pieces have not yet been published.

He received the 2003 Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the 2010 Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale and the 2014 Robert Schumann Prize for Poetry and Music, among many other awards. He was named composer in residence for the 2024-25 season at the Berlin Philharmonic.

“At times he was even like a court composer” for Germany, music critic Manuel Brug wrote in Die Welt.

Wolfgang Michael Rihm was born in Karlsruhe, in southwest Germany, on March 13, 1952, to Julius and Margarete Rihm. His father was a treasurer for the Red Cross, and his mother oversaw the household.

Wolfgang made his first attempts at composition at 11, and later studied with German composers Eugen Werner Velte and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He first reached a wide audience with his intricate orchestra work “Morphonie,” which premiered at the Donaueschingen Music Days festival in 1974.

Early in Rihm’s career, highly structural dodecaphonic compositions, or works in which musical parameters were ordered in “rows” of 12, dominated European contemporary music. In contrast, he was sometimes described as a “neo-Romantic,” and he had a reputation as a fiercely independent artist who was constantly reinventing his aesthetic approach.

Failure didn’t seem to daunt him. “I’m also talented at stumbling,” he told Badische Neueste Nachrichten, a Karlsruhe, Germany-based newspaper, in 2020. “It’s a very early experience, knowing that one remains unique as one falls down.”

He insisted that great art results from aesthetic liberty and intellectual rigor, not adherence to predetermined ideas about beauty. “Dealing with art, making art, is already in itself a calling to boundless freedom,” he wrote in a 1984 essay. “There can be no deference, and yet in the most brutal way, the law of the strongest applies, namely the strongest idea.”

Rihm’s music created divergent impressions. In “Dis-Kontur,” he channeled primal acoustic violence; in “Fremde Szenen,” he turned repeated notes into passages of propulsive longing; in “Jagden und Formen,” he reassembled scraps of melody into bustling textures in which small pauses helped create a kinetic whole.

When Rihm started composing, many of his peers felt that contemporary classical music was at a dead end, with audiences dwindling and composers focused on arcane, abstract structures. His work, physical and deeply engaged with the past, showed that another approach was possible.

“He goes his own way and has always insisted on the freedom of the individual in the Enlightenment sense,” Eleonore Büning, the author of a biography of Rihm, said in a phone interview. “And that means that he freed himself from all the chains, handcuffs and dogmas connected with dodecaphonic and serial music.”

“And not just himself,” she added, “but also the next generations of musicians.”

In 1985, Rihm became a professor of composition at the Karlsruhe University of Music, where his students included Jörg Widmann and Rebecca Saunders. In 2016, he was appointed artistic director of the Lucerne Festival Academy, which trains young musicians, composers and directors in music of the 20th and 21st centuries.

As a teacher, “he fought steadily and consequently against polemic thinking, and he encouraged a decidedly personal aesthetic unique to each of his many students,” Saunders said in an email. “The curiosity, excitement and passion with which he engaged with music — any music — was contagious.”

Rihm once told Büning that despite the number of works he completed, he never found composing easy. He was a disciplined worker, but he was also fond of food, wine and conversation.

“He was a bon vivant who never thought of going without the good things in life,” philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, a longtime friend, said in an interview. “In a certain way he was an anti-ascetic character.”

The pleasure Rihm took in life was closely related to his art. “In general, there was nothing formless with him,” Sloterdijk said. “Even with the little things like cooking for friends: There was always a certain level of form and a certain inventive height. He never just cooked a simple recipe. He was always improvising and inventing.”

That work continued after his cancer diagnosis in 2017. After he began treatment, Rihm composed several songs, a cello concerto and a piece for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.

“Of course, like every person, I’m physically approaching the end,” he told Badische Neueste Nachrichten in 2020. “But I’m not at the end of my creative energy.”

Rihm’s first marriage, to Johanna Feldhausen-Rihm, ended in divorce. He and Uta Frank, whom he married in 1992, later separated but remained legally married until her death in 2013.

Verena Weber, whom he married in 2017, survives him. His other survivors include his son, Sebastian, from his marriage to Feldhausen-Rihm; his daughter, Katja Rihm, from his marriage to Frank; and a sister, Monika.

Rihm also leaves behind his vast and elusive body of work. He knew the importance that art can have after its creator’s death. “Art is what survives,” he wrote in the 1984 essay, “because it is (in whatever way) the shaping of human dignity.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.