Karlheinz Stockhausen: Striking accord

An ongoing Stockhausen festival is covered.

So what was Karlheinz Stockhausen? Genius or charlatan? Cool-headed rationalist or cloudy mystic? Austere technician or canny showman? The truth is he was a bit of all of them. With Stockhausen, the toe-curling and the visionary are so close, it’s often hard to tell them apart.

Karlheinz Stockhausen
Technocraft: Karlheinz Stockhausen

He came to prominence in the 1950s as an earnest lean-faced idealist who wanted to remake music from scratch with sounds and noises. In the Sixties, the hair grew longer, the love life more complicated, the music – now tinged with Eastern mysticism – more wildly ambitious. From the mid-Seventies he retreated from public view to write a vast cycle of seven operas, one for each day of the week, and another cycle of 24 pieces, one for each hour of the day.

Much of his later work remains unseen and unheard, and the early works have slipped from view. Now, on the first anniversary of his death, it’s all about to come surging back. From today the Southbank Centre in London presents a week-long festival of his music, and it’s also featured at the Huddersfield Festival later in the month. And on January 17 the BBC presents a “total immersion” day at the Barbican Centre.

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