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Rockwell Matters Episode Transcript 12/17/07

Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died earlier this month at the age of 79, was, one could argue and I will argue, the last great German Romantic composer. There may be more — Romanticism is not always dead as Harold Schonberg liked to say — but he is really part of a great line that extends back to Weber and Wagner and Richard Strauss. Now I say this despite his early reputation as an austere modernist, part of the Darmstadt school, the serialism, his later wonderful explorations of electronics in pieces like Gesang der Jünglinge, the fierceness of his solo piano pieces — none of this might seem Romantic, and yet like Iannis Xenaxis in Paris, modernist means served Romantic ends. But, in his later life, he put aside all pretensions to modernist rigor and turned himself into a true Romantic mystic.

For Stockhausen, sound, mystical spiritual enlightenment, and hugeness of scale defined his later ambitions. I would argue that what changed him and pushed him towards weirdness were trips in the mid 60's to Japan and to northern California, where he immersed himself in the hippie ethos. Paul Hillier, the British choral conductor, who has just come out with a lovely new recording of Stockhausen's "Stimmung" from 1968, argues that Terry Riley's "In C" and Stockhausen's "Stimmung" were the great musical products of classical avant-garde-ism in northern California in the 60's. I think "Stimmung" is great, but I think it's as German as it is Californian, and I think "In C" can rest content with its crown; still, it was a remarkable work.

He was a careerist in the sense that he knew how to adapt to the times, but he also became weirder and weirder, and it subverted his career success, so that in the later decades he was regarded as a kind of eccentric, strange loner. In that sense he reminds me of Sergiu Celibidache, the Romanian conductor (German based) who professed mystical purity but tried to be a careerist as well.

I remember once getting a letter from Stockhausen in the late '80s, including a book of his conversations inscribed to me, in which he invited me, as he put it, to become his "window to North America" — in other words, his champion. I politely declined — not that I hate him, but because I didn't want to be anyone's champion — but it was a strange mix of highfalutin lingo and naked careerism.

Paul Griffiths, in his obituary in the New York Times, called his later decades "extravagantly egomaniacal," and I think there's something to that. I have one other story about his Romanticism before I get into the later years, and that is, he wrote a piece in the 70's, I guess it was called "Hymnen" — Hymnen meaning a collage of national anthems. It appeared in a variety of versions — no, it was in the 60's, because I heard it in 1968 in Germany, and it was just after the crackdown on Dubcek and the Prague Spring, and there sat Stockhausen, amidst the huge array of musicians and electronic gear, and suddenly in the middle of it, he stood up and screamed the word, "Czechoslovakay!" — meaning "Czechoslovakia," which if nothing else was a dramatic statement.

He didn't always put his feet so surely in political matters though, because he got terrible heat for claiming that the 9/11 attacks were the greatest artwork in the history of man. In fact, it was much more intelligent than that, because he is obsessed, in his later works, with, among other figures, Lucifer and regarded it as a diabolic act. Still, it got him in further trouble. His later years were devoted to this huge cycle called "Light," or "Licht" — seven operas on the seven days of the week, composed between 1977 and 2002, and then when he finished that he launched into "Klang," or "Sound," which was meant to be 24 pieces for each of the hours of the day — he completed 21 before he died. The scale was huge, but the performances were few.

There is no way, at this point, to come to terms with his achievement — it's too vast, it's too weird. If Dresden fulfills its threat to perform the complete "Licht" cycle in 2008, perhaps we can start. In the meantime, I think kindly of him; he was a strange and symptomatic character of the 20th century. And it would just be wonderful if "Licht" and "Klang" turned out to be the masterpieces that he undoubtedly thought they were.

This is John Rockwell for Rockwell Matters.

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