Karlheinz Stockhausen revisited (Part 1)
Jun 20th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Something that happened in – and over – the small German city of Braunschweig (pop. 260,000) last week has plunged me into some long, long thoughts about this musical phenomenon, who since shortly after World War II has held rank at the very top echelon of the hard-core, most uncompromising musical avant-garde. You might, as an aide-mémoire, like to look in on his own website:
For openers let’s look back at a piece I wrote about him for the subscription website <www.musicalamerica.com> the summer of 2004 (and incidentally, non-subscribers to that most recent incarnation of the USA’s oldest musical publication, founded all the way back in the 19th century, to which I’ve contributed in one incarnation or another for slightly more than half a century, automatically get a complimentary two week subscription by simply logging on there):
“Conceivably, no composer in history has had his 75th birthday observed the way Karlheinz Stockhausen did his on Aug. 22 at the Salzburg Festival. Certainly has no such ballyhooed birthday tribute to any composer ever so hopelessly, almost totally boomeranged as did this one.
“According to the composer – who incontestably has exercised a primary influence on contemporary music since his early essays into the field of electronic music in the early 1950s – this entire undertaking began with a dream he had years ago. Stockhausen has never taken any manifestation of his teeming brain lightly, so he predictably converted this one into a string quartet with no precedent (and no imaginable successor), with the four ensemble members each aloft in an individual helicopter (rented on this occasion from the Austrian military) equipped with microphone and camera, with all that electro-sonic pabulum transmitted to a central point below, and with everything purportedly coordinated into one grand art work at a control console presided over by (who else?) Stockhausen. Few composers have matched this congenital cynosure’s gift for consistently putting himself bang in the middle of things.
“The quartet’s score dates from 1993, when the Salzburg Festival commissioned it. Unfortunately, budget cuts prevented the exceptionally costly anticipated world premiere from becoming reality. Amsterdam proved better fixed financially, and the actual world premiere took place in those more affluent Dutch skies eight years ago.
“No matter. The nice round figure of 75 (with 14 grandchildren from various slavishly idolatrous wives and other ladies) impelled the Salzburg Festival’s Intendant Peter Ruzicka, himself a reputable and thoroughly contemporary composer, to recycle Stockhausen’s Helikopter-Quartett last Friday, with the reputable and valorous Stadler Quartet sawing away aloft in the protracted tremolo passages; television excerpts conveyed a substantial portion of the whole.
“Just as Igor Stravinsky mightily impressed his publishers and record companies with his comprehensive grasp of the business aspect of musical art, so has Stockhausen consistently revealed something bordering on genius for attracting attention and breath-taking publicity to his creations.
“Prior to last Friday, all the advance publicity for this exquisitely planned event focused on the birthday boy himself, who according to some sources has mellowed somewhat since his electrifyingly arrogant and irascible earlier years, when he swiftly acquired a global reputation for burning with the hardest of Walter Pater’s hard, gemlike flames. (At the world premiere of one Stockhausen opus at Darmstadt’s annual summertime avant-garde bash, when the ever more restive audience shuffled its collective feet crescendo until even the conducting composer could no longer overhear it, he stopped the performance cold by assuming the stance of a man crucified, waiting with his back to the audience for total, but total silence, then turned around to inform everyone evenly that he and his colleagues had come there that evening to work, and anyone unwilling to permit them to do that in reverential silence should get out and let them get back to it.)
“The jam Stockhausen got himself into in Hamburg not long after 9/11 today seems forgotten, or at least forgiven — quite an indulgence, since on that occasion, in connection with some important performances of his works long scheduled for a Hamburg festival, he had described the 2001 terrorist destruction of Manhattan’s twin towers as ‘the greatest artwork there has ever been’ and with characteristic self-effacement called it an artwork even greater than anything he could ever bring off. His stunned Hamburg hosts immediately disinvited him (one of his daughters, a professional pianist, voiced the possibility of jettisoning her original surname in shame and protest) and canceled his entire schedule there. That explosive brouhaha drove him into prudent temporary seclusion until the storm blew over.
“Which, in view of Ruzicka’s and Salzburg’s present attitude, it obviously has. When the great day arrived last week, virtually all attention focused on Stockhausen until things got started at 6 p.m. But from that point on almost everything that conceivably could go wrong, at least from the musical standpoint, did, and all in the blinding glare of American-style p.r. limelight in overdrive.
“Probably plenty of the estimated 10,000 people at that official opening of the Salzburg airport’s brand-new Hangar 7 not only arrived but also departed with only the vaguest idea of Stockhausen’s identity, let alone his music. But assuredly nobody escaped without having the name of a prosperous Austrian soft drink branded indelibly into the brain for all time, for the funds that made possible the Stockhausen event came from that source.
“Advance publicity had trumpeted the boast that paying guests, ranging in various speculations between 200 and 10,000 (at a uniform 500 Euros [$545] a head or a trifling 50 Euros for the plebeians content to stay outside), would join such invited celebrities as Prince Albert of Monaco, the immortal Fussball hero Franz Beckenbauer, and the racing driver turned airline-owner Niki Lauda; others brandished in the television coverage included a pretty black model who conceded she knew little or nothing about Stockhausen or such music (‘but I’m always learning’) and a German peroxide-blonde bubblehead with the eponymous nom de porn Dolly Buster, who loomed large indeed in the forward direction. One (presumably German) astronaut present readily conceded, on camera, that he had never before even heard the name Stockhausen.
“Karl Harb, who covered the gala for the Salzburger Nachrichten, reported that ‘after a few minutes … a demonstrative exodus of festival guests’ began to thin out the crowd indoors, where the loudspeakers under Stockhausen’s control amplified the string sounds (and of course the rotors’ infernal racket) transmitted from on high. ‘Hundreds left the [indoor] space and streamed into the open. The remaining good half, those who had held out for the 20 minutes of tremolo string music and rotor-blade noise, contributed violent [heftig] applause.’ Stockhausen ‘decidedly’ expressed his thanks for ’such an impressive “counter-demonstration.”‘
“So what went wrong?
“The soft-drink company has accumulated a collection of aircraft ‘classics,’ scheduled for Hangar 7 housing with an adjoining gourmet restaurant. Conceivably with a bug planted in his ear by Ruzicka, he picked up the tab for what turned into some undeniably spectacular ‘aeronautic theater’ outside, featuring abundant pretty models hoisted aloft by their feet and crawling all over moving ground aircraft, with flashy lighting reminiscent of Hollywood premieres during their most glorious days.
“To judge by the television coverage of Stockhausen’s exit from the hangar, with a resigned but far from sanguine look on his face and his figurative tail between his legs, he suffered not only one of the few upstagings in his career but one the most crushing. To a TV reporter who jumped him seconds before he vanished, he called the musical event just concluded ‘too noisy, with simply too many other noises, from outside — you could hear the helicopters even through the [hangar roof] — with too many commercial aircraft, and inside many people actually interested only in the spectacle.’ Just before picking up his bag and disappearing, he magnanimously added, with what looked like a forced half-smile: ‘For the eye, very impressive.’
“Hubert Lepka, the T-shirted Salzburg dancer and director responsible for this spectacle (which he entitled ‘Taurus Rubens,’ an approximate Latinization of that soft drink’s name), had at his disposal 40 aircraft and auxiliaries, 80 ‘actors and parachute jumpers, and a narrator helpfully reciting 15 scenes from the sagas of the ancient Greek gods — an overwhelming array with which Stockhausen’s puny four Black Hawk helicopters couldn’t even begin to compete. Last April, incidentally, Lepka had staged his ‘Hannibal’ spectacle high up on an alpine glacier, which no doubt helped him land this Hanger 7 gig..
“Stockhausen can look forward to a kind of smaller-scaled Salzburg comeback Aug. 29, with the world premiere of his Düfte (“Smells, Scents”), interpolating precisely that — a portion of ‘Light,’ his multi-’opera’ super-Wagnerian cycle already long in progress.”
Tomorrow I’ll continue this meditative stroll back down Memory Lane (reverting momentarily to my Texas origins) “if the good Lord’s willin’ and the crick don’t rise. . . .”
Stay tuned.
