Stockhausen (concluded)
Jun 25th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Since I recently brought up Germany’s perennially avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, apopos of the musical mountebankery above the city of Braunschweig, I feel constrained to drop the other shoe so I herewith drop it – rather unconventionally since this takes us all the way back to a report I wrote for www.musicalamerica.com almost six years ago:
September 19, 2001
BERLIN – Ever since the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen burst upon the international avant-garde scene soon after World War II ended in 1945, he has occupied an unshakable position as one of the trinity that includes Pierre Boulez and Luigi Nono. Never noted primarily for humility, Stockhausen, now 73, has since then almost turned himself into an independent state, with a personal Website www.stockhausen.org that omits nothing except perhaps the aroma of incense. Since Monday he has his foot so firmly in his mouth that this week’s outrageous faux pas could possibly do to his career what Cab Calloway’s swinging “The Star-Spangled Banner” long ago did to his: come close to destroying it.
Hamburg’s brilliant Generalmusikdirektor Ingo Metzmacher, long a champion and friend of Stockhausen’s, wanted to adorn Hamburg’s current music festival, sponsored by the admirable weekly newspaper Die Zeit, with four concerts of Stockhausen’s music, with the composer in charge, as the festival’s high point, but Stockhausen himself torpedoed all that at a press conference Monday when a journalist’s question elicited one of the most grotesquely tasteless and inappropriate statements concerning terrorism from any quarter since last week’s calamity in New York and Washington.
Fortunately, Hamburg’s Norddeutscher Rundfunk recorded what the master said, and it pulls the rug completely out from under subsequent attempts to disassociate himself from what demonstrably did emerge from his mouth. Those attempts include an UPPER-CASE STATEMENT hastily posted on his Website by one of his most dedicated acolytes, amounting only to a feeble sort of “What he really meant to say” addendum that has little bearing on the recorded documentation.
The announcer on a Sender Freies Berlin radio program obliged to deal with the story found Stockhausen’s text so repulsive he prefaced it with these words: “I must honestly confess that I find it very hard to quote Stockhausen’s own words here, which you can read today everywhere in the newspapers, but it is indeed important in order to show how blind the ivory tower can make [one], and how fatally Esoterik [the German term for New Age, occultism, etc.] sometimes connects itself with irresponsibility.” He also referred to Stockhausen’s “hardly exceedable cynicism and horrifying arrogance.”
The Anglophone edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung carries this report from its staff member Julia Spinola:
“Asked at a press conference on Monday for his view of the events [in New York and Washington], Stockhausen answered that the attacks were ‘the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.’ According to [the tape transcript], he went on: ‘Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn’t even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then five thousand people are dispatched into the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn’t do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world.’”
Some journalists present reacted galvanically. When one asked whether Stockhausen equated art and crime, he replied: “It’s a crime because those involved didn’t consent. They didn’t come to the ‘concert.’ That’s obvious. And no one announced that they risked losing their lives. What happened in spiritual terms, the leap out of security, out of what is usually taken for granted, out of life, that sometimes happens to a small extent in art, too, otherwise art is nothing.’”
The Zeit Foundation and Hamburg’s Cultural Senator Christina Weiss reacted even more galvanically, almost immediately calling Stockhausen’s scheduled appearances “no longer acceptable” and canceling all four concerts.
The reaction of Stockhausen’s pianist daughter Mariella, who lives in Berlin, reveals more than merely this week’s tensions; she has had no contact with her father for the past two and a half years. Berlin’s Tagesspiegel quotes her as saying she will never again appear under the name Stockhausen, and that if her father equates crime and art, she calls that “fascistic.” She also regards his subsequent excuses as “an expression of cowardice.”
The Tagesspiegel also sought the reaction of the composer György Ligeti, who accuses his colleague of having “placed himself on the side of the terrorists. If he interprets this treacherous mass murder as an artwork, then unfortunately I must say he belongs confined to a psychiatric clinic.” Stockhausen left Hamburg yesterday for his home near Cologne, in what the press describes as a “bad [schlimm] psychic state.”
Many years ago the immortal James Thurber, fed to the teeth with an epidemic of exegetic blather about an author I may or may not correctly recall as Henry James, published a savagely satirical piece in The New Yorker called “A Final Note on Chanda Bell”, a name Thurber invented for this specific purpose. For the foreseeable future, let me wrap up my own similar standpoint on Prof. Stockhausen with Thurber’s valedictory line about Chanda Bell:
I am sick and tired of the whole God-damned subject.
http://www.analogartsensemble.net/labels/9__11.html
Sad to see this myth living on. Your piece was accurate six years ago amid the feeding frenzy that ensued, when everyone based their reporting on what was coming out of Germany.
But the truth is a far different thing, as we discussed at ANABlog once again in December of 2006 (see link above).
“Sad to see this myth living on.”
Myth-schmyth. At the time of that incident, my efforts as a throughly experienced professional (with a reputation for accuracy and reliability abundantly documented by many years of publication in the most demanding and reputable publications on both sides of the Atlantic) to get the only accurate and reliable documentarion included telephoning Hamburg’s Norddeutscher Rundfunk, which had tape-recorded the entire Hamburg discourse – the only immutable and totally reliable record of what Stockhausen had in fact said; that became the source for my quotations.
“Your piece was accurate six years ago amid the feeding frenzy . . .”
– a spongy, far from specific bit of terminology, incidentally -
” . . . that ensued, when everyone based their reporting on what was coming out of Germany.”
Where else? Did that incident take place in Hamburg or didn’t it? My piece remains every bit as accurate today as at the time I wrote it. Stockhausen and his implacable apologists can talk themselves blue in the face about what he really and truly meant; the one and only unalterable record of what he did in fact say remains that tape-recording, made by expert professionals, with no axe to grind and for one purpose only: to transcribe, for the record, the utterances made, and at the moment of their making.
Oh dear. Where to begin?
Everyone was in a feeding frenzy at that time. You couldn’t breathe a word that might sound anti-American without being pilloried. If you’ve heard the tape recording, then you know the context. Stockhausen was asked if Lucifer exists today or if he is just a character in his operas. Stockhausen used the example that was on everyone’s mind by pointing out that if you were Lucifer, you might well look on 9/11 as your greatest work of art. That’s all he was saying.
Journalism gets things wrong from time to time. Your sarcastic reply to my point that you based your piece on German reports does little to answer the charge that the German reporting at the time was wrong. Fairly soon after that in our country, the media would go on to misreport the state of WMD’s in Iraq. Just because you read it in the newspaper doesn’t make it so. And just because you’ve been published on both sides of the Atlantic doesn’t make you infallible.
In this instance, you happen to be wrong. If you want to keep believing that Stockhausen believes 9/11 was a work of art, and that he was not giving an honest, heartfelt answer to a question about the presence of evil in contemporary society, more power to you. As a consummate professional, I’m sure this isn’t the first time your reporting has been questioned, nor will it be the last.
I suppose if you like things black and white and prefer reality to come at you in tidy little packages then it does all boil down to whether or not Stockhausen spoke those words.
But life for grown ups is a lot more complex. I’d strongly encourage you to read a transcript of the entire press conference. It’s widely available. Just google it, and you’ll see that his comments came in the middle of a line of questioning about Lucifer and the other spiritual characters in his seven-opera cycle ‘Licht’.
That press conference was on 9/16/01, just 5 days after the attack. Perhaps you don’t recall but anyone who stepped out of rhetorical lockstep was brutalized in the media. Bill Maher famously lost his show on ABC for pointing out that what the terrorists did wasn’t technically ‘cowardly’. As someone who’s written about the complex psychology of motives and how they relate to action, you most certainly know better than to dismiss someone’s words based on a single sound clip with no context.