Page 7, 3rd September 1993

3rd September 1993

Page 7

Page 7, 3rd September 1993 — Cosmic battles and musical notes
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Locations: Cologne, Leipzig, Paris

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Cosmic battles and musical notes

BY EDWARD Fox REAL GENIUS CERTAINLY demands not just intelligence, but also an instinct for knowing how to push against the course of history in the right place, and alter it, like a giant diverting a river.
In a world as populous and complex as the one we live in, it is hard to spot this happening. But it would be wrong to conclude that genius had died out, like some species of dinosaur.
I have always felt that the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen is one of the great geniuses of our age. Yet not everyone thinks so, mainly because they dislike his music.
His innovations have been in a style of music that is difficult, cerebral, concerned with highly theoretical compositional processes.
He seems to go strongly against the grain of the kind of musical sensibility that prevails in England.
He is currently engaged in the composition of one of the century's great works of cultural gigantism, a cycle of seven operas, named individually after the days of the week, under the collective title LIGHT, which he grandly insists be written in capital letters.
The fourth opera in the cycle, "Dienstag" (Tuesday) was premiered in Leipzig in May. One would be hard put to find in it any relationship with the grand opera of the past.
Its plot is a heavenly struggle between the Archangel Michael, who, in Stockhausen's imaginative universe, created the world and is the agent of all creative activity on earth, and Lucifer, the intelligent, debonair, tempting agent of death, decay and corruption.
Their conflict ends in a stalemate: Stockhausen sees life on earth as a stand-off in the conflict between good and evil. The action unfolds in a strange, marvellous, yet elaborately-developed stage-craft that is like the classical
dramatic tradition of being from another planet.
The high point of the opera is a scene entitled "Pieta", in which Michael, having been killed in a cosmic battle by Lucifer's forces, lies in the arms of his mother, Eve, and subsequently rises from the dead in a passage of music that is serene, beautiful and celebratory.
The obvious parallels with the Passion and Resurrection of Christ are all the more striking for the fact that Stockhausen has always sought to avoid familiar references to the western tradition.
Yet here the broken body of Michael lies across his mother's lap like a living recreation of Michelangelo's sculpture of the same name. The scene is a powerful evocation of the spirit of redemption.
Stockhausen's career is marked by innovations that have shaped the course of 20th century art music, establishing it as a distinct chapter in the history of Western music.
Like an inventor with a string of basic patents to his name, he has introduced a series of elementary, original ideas that have been developed by himself and by other composers to form the idiom of contemporary music.
Behind this lies a terrific force of personality, an essential component in the character of a genius. At 65, Stockhausen does not own a television, never reads newspapers, hardly reads books, and has an unselfconscious, childlike unworldliness.
But he has a commitment to his own vision that is expressed in a devotion to work that would physically exhaust most people.
Although the cosmology that underlies LIGHT and other works is conspicuously home-made, it is interesting to consider Stockhausen as a Catholic composer.
Stockhausen's Catholicism was the spiritual support that enabled him to survive a traumatic childhood and adolescence in Nazi Germany and
its aftermath.
It was the means by which he imposed order and meaning on the chaos he saw around him, and in a sense it still is. Speaking of his youth, Stockhausen said, "I was a very dogmatic Catholic by my own choice, after the war in particular because I was in a state school where religion was forbidden. And we could only pray secretly in the night."
Later he would attend Mass daily at a Dominican church near Cologne, At 24, he stud
ied in Paris under Olivier Messiaen, the 20th century's most obviously Catholic composer.
Stockhausen broke with Catholicism in 1961, at the age of 33, when he fell in love with artist Mary Bauermeister, while still married to his first wife Doris. It precipitated a spiritual crisis.
"I don't know what to do," Stockhausen said. "So being a strict Catholic I knew that I had what we called excommunicated myself." Yet the practice of prayer, and the dependence on a spiritual core in his life and work, stayed with him.
In recent years, the spiritual dimensions has come to dominate Stockhausen's music. His spirituality has made him hard to categorise, and made him appear rather eccentric. This, and the uncompromising radicalism of his music, has earned Stockhausen a place outside the home comforts of the main stream.
He is a brave, lonely, inspiring figure.




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