Adieu (Stockhausen)

Adieu für Wolfgang Sebastian Meyer is a composition for wind quintet by Karlheinz Stockhausen composed in 1966.

A visit made a few days later to a comprehensive exhibition in The Hague of Piet Mondrian's paintings made Stockhausen ask himself, when confronted with Mondrian's well-known series of paintings titled simply "compositions"—with their strict organization by vertical and horizontal lines dividing the canvasses into rectangles—why it should be necessary to take months of concentrated work to produce a piece.

The main material consists of long-drawn out, static or slowly changing sound expanses, interrupted at intervals by general pauses and five short, unfinished traditional tonal cadences, reminiscent of Mozart.

[4] These broken-off cadence fragments open and close Adieu, and divide the whole into four large sections of 144 time units each.

On the other hand, where 13 combines with 8 to form a larger section of 21 units, the 13 bar will take on in addition to trills the character associated with 21, which is crescendo.