kagablog

When Stockhausen was 20, he wasn’t sure what he was going to be. If anything, he suspected he might become a writer, and he even spent one summer break writing a novel about the life of Humayun, the Mughal Emperor. Less than two weeks into the writing process, with the set of brass balls only Stockhausen could possess, he sent some samples of his writing, including a few poems to Hesse, who had won the Nobel Prize just three years earlier. Accompanying the samples was a six-page handwritten letter which is a stunning revelation of Stockhausen’s frame of mind:

Dear Mr. Hesse,

That I finally worked up so much courage to choose this means in order to speak to you, I will perhaps come to understand one day later in life, and I believe—were I to gaze into a mirror, it would be found out—that my cheeks are burned scarlet, as though they had been whipped. It may be shame, desperate shame, or a clattering fragmentation of an unconsciously confident, trusting naivete, of a salvaged, forgivable boyish atmosphere. Forgive me nothing, not even the salutation “dear sir,” if you deem it to be immature impertinence. I cannot help but become calmer, once having taken the fatal step.

Why I wanted to write you, I have known at no point in time more exactly, to tell the truth. It may be that I could tell this unfathomable thing to my mother, but she has passed on; I do not even know whether she would have summoned up an understanding for my idle prattling—if so, it would have been for the first time: Where are the dead, who would understand us best? Though she did not relish all this, [she] must really have been very wise, as she voiced the opinion one night in the year 1933: in the loft is Heaven, in the cellar, Hell; at that time I had counted almost five yearly cycles—yet now I no longer know whether Heaven is not Hell and that time is not timelessness. However, this worries me less (I am certainly too stupid, to recognize despairingly that one cannot know anything); what torments much more is the certainty of still not being accepted, of being smiled at, of being absolutely misunderstood. And my father just didn’t understand it at all, as I believed him to know. Might it perhaps be different now, if he were not rotting in some moldy wartime hole in the ground? So there remains the sieved coagulation of people, whom I allowed to force themselves on me yesterday and aforetimes—they have all had enough of associating with each other, just as have I with any of them.

This is the letter of a boy who has lost everything and had nothing come along to fill the void. The mental distress that Stockhausen is under is starkly clear, and in August of 1949, he wasn’t so much reaching out to the Nobel laureate for writing tips as he was searching for a father figure, someone to help him finish the job of forming his personality:

forgive me, if in relation to liberty I cast you in a special role and begged something of you—it is the happiest feeling, the most beautiful experience of all mysteries: ‘that love is woven through everything,’ if one can ask a great man for something. In the distance the ‘ability’ is given to me, you have called me with your thoughts…I write down for you now some of my ungainly, most secret endeavours; please, grant me also this impossible effort and say just one word, if they withstand your examination.

Karlheinz Stockhausen
Music student in Cologne

Earlier in the letter, he explains that Hesse’s works seem to him like “thought-islands” which rise up above their author. This is an early iteration of a concept that would be so fundamental to Stockhausen’s work: that his music is greater than its composer and originates from a higher source.

We will unfold this concept in other discussions. However, as we bring this brief survey of Stockhausen’s career to a close, we are only further compelled to look at the way in which Hesse responded to the young composer.

First off, he dismissed out of hand the idea of reading Stockhausen’s writing samples. He wrote, “I am 72 years old, have had eye trouble for years, and am overloaded every day to the point of exhaustion. As for reading manuscripts, this is out of the question.”

But to this sprawling, desperate letter from a completely unknown student, he wrote a generous, deeply empathetic one-and-a-half page reply:

It will be best if I say to you in plain words how your letter has pleased me.

What has pleased me is your gift, it promises something: it is not that of a man of letters but that of a poet.

What has also pleased me is the sincerity with which you seek to make clear to yourself and to me the problems of your life and of your generation. Together with that gift, it is something positive and beautiful.

…What has not pleased me…is much about the tone of your letter which reminds me of what the foreigner imagines as “German youth”: something extravagant and enamored of pain and desperation, “Faustian” and therefore philosophically Existential, which we foreigners don’t think much of. This youth, intoxicated with tragedy and greatness, was once, when he roamed about with backpack and guitar, half comical and half charming. Soon afterwards, however, he became excellently adapted to warfare: conquering, torturing, and other activities, which we likewise do not think much of.

Something else about your letter which does not please me has more to do with the universal—that which you have in common with your generation—than with the individual. It would make me happy therefore if you would direct all your energy to shaping and bringing to maturity that which is individual, unique, and beautiful in you, and to diminishing as much as possible the other, collective thing, or at least to distrust it; it is a dowry without much value.”

With pinpoint precision, Hesse dissects not only the issues that Stockhausen faces in forging an identity in the wake of so much loss but all of post-war Germany. Hesse has little tolerance for self-pity. One of the masters in The Glass Bead Game is blacklisted from giving private lessons to pupils because he has a tendency towards melancholy (maybe even thoughts of suicide). Such indulgences must be avoided in Hesse’s world view, and certainly cannot be passed on to students!

But the real kernel of truth that shaped Stockhausen in that letter is Hesse’s urging to cast off any sense of the universal, any sense that he shares a common lot with the rest of his generation. Instead, he pushes Stockhausen to focus on what sets him apart, what makes him an individual voice, and if there is one singular trait of Stockhausen’s writing, it is the uniqueness of his voice.

For the next year, the two stayed in correspondence. Stockhausen openly referred to Hesse as his teacher at one point, and after he had submitted some of his poems to a publisher in October of 1949, Hesse sent him a remonstrance via postcard:

It does not please me that you want to earn money right away with your manuscripts. You have the good fortune to be able to do this with music and thus keep your poetical activities away from this area. If music is more sacred for you than poetry, perhaps then you can earn your bread by writing for newspapers, etc., but that means at the same time a farewell to poetry.

In 1950, the following year, the spiral of Stockhausen’s life work would begin.

The farewell to his teacher came on September 22, of that year. He apologizes for his “helpless bawling”, and he thanks Hesse for helping him to form his personality, the same personality which would be such an elemental force in shaping so much of 20th century culture.

Stockhausen uses another metaphor of organic growth to describe the transformation that Hesse cultivated. He compares his newly formed personality to a crystal, formed from the salt of his tears:

“I stumbled over it, when I stole secretly into my garden, whereas my foot stepped nimbly over the other stones…

…Very, very dear do I hold the great, crystalline stone today. You have thrown it to me, and it has blossomed like an eternal rose. Thanks be to you, and thanks be to the God of grace, who let me stumble over it.”

Karlheinz Stockhausen in the Cologne Studio

the site in quetion is at http://www.analogartsensemble.net/labels/Karlheinz%20Stockhausen.html