I am tremendously saddened to learn of the death of one of the 20th century's greatest composers, Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Stockhausen had an alchemist's ability to transform the base metals of total serialism into music of purest gold; in his hands the pedagogical rigors of the twelve-tone system melted into playfulness and joy.
He was the first living composer whose music bowled me over, for its sheer daring, its mixture of the monumental and the intimate, its sheer aural splendor. It is easy to make fun of his earnestness, his oddball mysticism, his late-in-life musical megalomania. But one should never forget that this was a man traumatized as a child by the Nazis, who euthanized his mentally ill mother. The fact that he could write music of such world-embracing scope is something of a miracle.
About ten years ago or so I was listening to a recording of his marvelous dual-piano work Mantra, about as good an example of his aesthetic as any, and following along with a score I borrowed from the New York Public Library. I noticed some mistakes in the score--not as hard as it seems to detect, given the way the piece is plotted. So I wrote to Stockhausen to let him know. And to my surprise and delight received a response handwritten by him, thanking me for the letter, acknowledging the mistake (the score is full of mistakes, he wrote), suggesting other recordings of the work, and finishing with his famous signature -- Stockhausen.
May his music live long.
