Recently, the pioneer of electronic music (1928–2007) has even advanced to become a comic book hero – thanks to the Graphic Novel "Stockhausen – the Man Who Came from Sirius". The certainty with which Stockhausen detailed the further course of his life as a composer in 1998 has persistently unsettled people. After works about the year, the months, and the seven days of the week, he initially wanted to musicalize every hour of the day, then the minutes, and finally, as his last work, a single second. He would layer 512 individual moments for the duration of a brief moment. In this way, the course of time was to be brought, so to speak, into the vertical. The listener, he dreamed further, should be able to assemble a sound from the individual parts himself.
So here was someone who spoke quite naturally about the forthcoming work of presumably two or three decades while already being a proud 70 years old. Stockhausen's unwavering will to "be in control", as he once said, the vehemence with which he planned himself and his creations, his desire for as seamless control as possible was admired and feared by all. In the end, however, he was not granted the opportunity to influence his own duration on this planet. Of the 24 hours, he could only compose 21 in his final cycle "Klang".<br> <br>There are various versions circulating regarding the exact sound of his last words on December 5, 2007. He is said to have said he found a new way to breathe. In any case, he was obviously taken by surprise by death. And not only he: Those who saw and met him were astonished until the end at the enormous creative power and mental sharpness with which he worked as ever.
Having thought and done something first was at least as important to Stockhausen as the quality of what emerged from the invention. Whoever dared to assert to him that one or another thing he claimed for himself possibly originated from someone else had to prepare for a considerable response.
Many were intimidated and scared off by the force of his demands, while others were simultaneously drawn to him magically. Especially in the 1950s and 1960s, during his artistically most fertile time, composers from all over the world came to be near him: to the electronic studio of WDR in Cologne or to the Darmstadt summer courses, which he long dominated as a teacher and role model. The speed at which Stockhausen produced masterpiece after masterpiece during that time has few comparisons in music history.
Stockhausen dealt with his resources in a remarkably economical way: he primarily used them for himself and his own music. What was composed around him rarely received his undivided attention. What had been composed before him, never. This radical restriction to self-creation and the wide-ranging disinterest in so-called tradition is inadequately labeled with the tag "egomania".
Born on August 22, 1928, in Mödrath near Cologne, raised in poor conditions, the Second World War took the father from the growing boy. The melancholic mother fell victim to the racial insanity of the Nazis. In the much-cited "Zero Hour", Stockhausen, like so many others, saw the opportunity for a fresh start without looking back. Unlike others, however, he did not stop at a one-time new beginning. To start anew, especially alone, became a life principle for him.
After a brief training as a school musician in Cologne, then with composer Olivier Messiaen in Paris and phonetician Werner Meyer-Eppler in Bonn, he grew inwardly more distant from the rest of the world. For a moment only did he bow to the great colleague Anton Webern; after that, Stockhausen – at least officially – referred only to one: Stockhausen.
Even the enormous success of the young composer, who rose to the top of the European avant-garde almost overnight, could not disguise that Karlheinz Stockhausen had little in common with the modernity that celebrated him: His spectacular early works, the experiments with musical electronics, spatialization, or open form, which revolutionized music history roughly every six months, were expressions of a deeply religious feeling.
In the late 1960s, Stockhausen began his long journey from the center of music life to its periphery. Esoteric thought permeated deeper into his work. What was initially covered by the zeitgeist of hippie culture soon found itself subjected to malicious criticism. To dismiss Stockhausen as a crackpot became easy. Yet, amidst all the mystical fog surrounding the "Light" protagonists Michael, Eva, and Lucifer, the genius of the man from whom not a few hoped after the war that he could carry the beacon of German-Austrian musical culture into a new era again shone through in his late works. The nationalistic undertone of this hope must have disgusted him, though not the confidence in his creative ability.
What will remain of an artist is a popular question at his grave. Stockhausen died on December 5, 2007, in his home in Kürten near Cologne. However, the question will likely remain open for a long time.
