Herbstmusik
Herbstmusik was written in March 1974[1] and was premiered in the Großer Glockensaal in Bremen on 4 May 1974, by the score's three dedicatees, Péter Eötvös, Joachim Krist, and Suzanne Stephens, along with the composer himself.
[2] It is an early step in a series of works from the 1970s exploring theatrical elements in music, progressing from Trans and Inori through Musik im Bauch, Atmen gibt das Leben, and Sirius, leading ultimately to the opera cycle Licht.
[5] At the same time, it is an attempt to preserve endangered sounds and customs of the harvest season in Stockhausen's country homeland, the Bergisches Land east of Cologne.
Together with the cellist Gaby Schumacher, flautist David C. Johnson, and violist Joachim Krist, Eötvös organised a regular summer concert series held in the barn attached to the farmhouse.
It was in this barn that rehearsals were begun for Herbstmusik, with Eötvös, Krist, Stockhausen, and the American clarinettist Suzanne Stephens, who was visiting to perform in one of the Summer Night Music concerts.
These varied sounds follow a formal process in five stages, leading from ordinary nailing to a final, very delicate phase with "individual short trills, soft rebounds, … and magically iridescent timbres".
[21] Even a sympathetic critic could only conclude by quoting the character Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice: "Music is the most ambiguous of all the arts".
[12] When Herbstmusik was next given at the second Rencontres Internationales d’Art Contemporaine in La Rochelle on 28 June, one critic savaged it as "the lowpoint of a uniquely varied career", finding the earlier Alphabet für Liège a much more subtle and rich exploration of the "'musicalization' of everyday activity".
[22][2] It was performed for a third time at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse shortly afterward, when a reviewer chose only to mention that it included a "delightfully tuneful duet for violin and clarinet at the end".
[23] A later writer detects a sense of mischief in Stockhausen’s deliberate transposition of a non-visual, radiophonic sound play into a theatrical setting, where the visual element is guaranteed to be misconstrued.
From this perspective, the "documentary … scenic sound-actions" of Herbstmusik are regarded as showing the composer "at his most engaging and self-effacing", and are praised for their "truth and moral concreteness" which make a "refreshing change from the preciousness of conventional virtuosity".
