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.

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.

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.

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).