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The title of Harakiri, for small orchestra, speaker, and tape (1971), is taken from a well-known Japanese word for ritual suicide by disembowelment with a sword; the piece was premiered by an ad hoc orchestra at the Darmstadt summer course of 1972, where it created a stir in a year that was dominated by the issue of music and politics.

... The last two minutes of the score consist of a speech for a female voice that ends with the words: 'Crescendi are not value-free/Music conceals their danger,/mystifies their use./One should no longer, under the cover of structure, make a display of crescendi, which are only themselves.'

This speech indicates that the intention of the piece is to challenge or, as its title suggests, to destroy the expressive associations that crescendi and decrescendi carry with them.  In keeping with this aim, the long crescendo in the violins is not supported by the sorts of musical features that would create a climax, and it is not linked to the subsequent thunder clap ... Equally, the opening instruction to avoid any unnecessary movement that could even slightly disturb concentration is a request not for a parody of spirituality, but for the musicians to focus on the sounds in a way that might dissolve pre-established modes of listening.

The score stands at an interesting junction for, despite sharing with serialism a mistrust of subjective expression, it directly challenges serialism's formalist principles by indicating that musical structure carries ideological content.  Such an extreme score is likely to function as a transition to something else, because its point can only be made a limited number of times.  What could not be predicted, however, was that only a couple of years after its premiere, Rihm would emerge with a strong endorsement of subjective expression.

Appropriately, the impact of Harakiri extended beyond its own internal procedures.  It was commissioned by Clytus Gottwald, who was then new music producer at the Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart, to be premiered in 1972.  However, when Huber delivered the score, Gottwald cancelled the performance on the grounds that the composer had not fulfilled the commission.  Subsequently, a lengthy dialogue ensued between the two protagonists and interested parties, which eventually appeared in edited form in the new music journal Melos, as did subsequent letters from Gottwald and Huber.  Gottwald's basic point is that Harakiri is not about the difficulty of socially aware composition, but instead amounts to an avoidance of the problem.  In order to demonstrate that he did not always shy away from risk, he added that he had scheduled a performance of Lachenmann's Kontrakadenz; and in a later letter, he positions Lachenmann as Huber's antipode on the basis that he strives to articulate social contradictions instead of prematurely suspending work. (Gottwald did, however, experience Lachenmann's appetite for polemic when he subsequently chaired the first round of the Lachenmann-Henze dispute.)  Huber responded that he was 'proud to have developed a new function for the length of sound' and that compositional problems are social problems.  For him, therefore, Gottwald did not understand fully the aim of trying to politicize music by suspending its traditional categories.

Église Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza (sagesse ou connaissance)
Francesco Borromini