The reign of the Swedish king Gustav III (1771–92) was a productive period musically. It has become one of the main fields of research within Swedish musicology: more than 40 scholarly articles have been published and ten book-length studies have been printed since 1920. In the article, these texts are read from a critical perspective in order to scrutinize the foundation of the research and to analyse its conditions, but also to see if a transgression is possible.

If the ethos of Swedish musicology, with its empirical attitude concerning the survey of sources, can be confirmed in many cases, some examples show that there have been important alternatives: the intention of writing the cultural history of the period (especially Walin and Hedwall), the interest in rhetoric during the 1990s, and investigations of nationalism. The shift from a German to an Anglo-American influence can be discerned during the 1950s, and this change can be the reason why a wider cultural approach became obsolete.

Yet, responding to the earlier initiatives, it is suggested finally that musicology can and should turn back to the Gustavian era again after a caesura of fifteen years. Recent work within fields such as affectivity, phenomenology and cultural transfer call upon a re-reading of the manifold sources that have been found during a century of research.

Wolfgang Rihm often deals with musical history as material – his own works included – using a series of techniques and strategies. Adopting the technique of overpainting, confronting the German-Austrian tradition from Bach to the Second Vienna School through stylistic borrowings rather than actual quotes, and playing with musical ciphers, Rihm activates and decodes history. The past appears as fragments, but in Rihm’s later works, these fragments are swept away in a unstoppable flow.

Since the 1990s, Rihm’s treatment of fragment diverges clearly from Romantic and modernistic sensibilities, represented by for instance Robert Schumann’s song and piano cycles and György Kurtág’s fractured material. During the two last decades, the flow has been a salient feature of Rihm’s works, and the most divergent materials can appear in this inclusive flow.

Rihm’s transgressive treatment of the two seemingly opposite phenomena ‘fragment’ and ‘flow’ is no more apparent than in his ‘operatic fantasy’ Dionysos (2009–10). His starting point is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Dionysos-Dithyramben: he has rearranged and mixed textual fragments from the poems, but he has also turned to Nietzsche’s notebooks from the 1880s, that stockpile of fragments. The dismembering of bodies and the staging of a deteriorating mind enhances the process of fragmentation. These fragments loose their character of being fractured due to a musical flow that is in itself is blatantly heterogeneous.

In my paper I would like to elucidate the relation between the poles of fragment and flow, characterized not by tension, but by attraction. In the same way as with the Romantic and the modernistic fragment, Rihm’s flowing fragments can be seen as being paradigmatic for a specific period of history, our contemporary liquid culture.