Karlheinz Stockhausen

Dec 11 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

THE average chap would not have been able to name any of his tunes. For he was not the composer of breezy melodies to be hummed on the bus to work.

His work was held in high esteem by admirers of the avant-garde, but the observation by an expert that the appeal of his music to the general public was “more restricted” is delicious in its understatement.

Nonetheless, The Beatles, whose melodies are hummed on the bus to work, held Karlheinz Stockhausen in high enough regard to include his face in Peter Blake’s montage on the cover of the 1967 album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

His experiments with electronic music had interested Lennon and McCartney, who used the Mellotron for the first time on their single Strawberry Fields Forever, also 1967.

Stockhausen attracted immense controversy and, in popular assessment, he did for music what piles of bricks and unmade beds had done for art.

Indeed, when asked if he had heard any of Stockhausen’s work, Sir Thomas Beecham, the conductor from St Helens, replied: “No, but I think I have trodden in some”.

But there were many, including the man himself, who vigorously defended his output, claiming that he was the greatest German composer since Richard Wagner.

As is often the case with genius, Stockhausen endured an unhappy childhood, though he learned to play the piano, violin and oboe. His mother, Gertrud, a talented musician, who suffered from depression, was sent to an institution when he was four. She was later murdered by the Nazis as part of their euthanasia programme. Despite that, his father, Simon, a primary school teacher in Modrath, a small mining village near Cologne, joined the Nazi Party and enlisted in the army on the outbreak of war. He was killed in 1945.

Stockhausen was drafted into the army in 1944. In post-war Germany, he considered writing as a career, but he studied musicology, philology and philosophy at Cologne University.

He played in the Musique Concrete group in Paris. In all he wrote more than 300 orchestral, instrument and choral pieces of which Gesange der Junglinge (Song of the Young Boys) is perhaps the most famous.

Stockhausen, who married twice and had six children, also had mistresses.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, music composer; born August 27, 1928, died December 5, 2007.