Stockhausen unterwegs zu Wagner

The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the defining figures in 20th-century music history, created his works after 1950 explicitly from a post-Romantic perspective. Stockhausen's departure from Romantic aesthetics and the concept of art as religion since his first serial and electronic works was causally linked to the figure of Richard Wagner, who was ideologically appropriated by the National Socialists in a devastating manner before Stockhausen began his career as a composer. Despite this biographical circumstance, which explains Stockhausen's lifelong reserve toward Wagner, his oeuvre is characterized by a specifically Wagnerian continuation of German-Austrian music history. He passed on and transformed Wagner's artistic maxims, above all in his seven-part music theater work LICHT (1977–2003), which far exceeds the temporal scope of Der Ring des Nibelungen and the world-explaining gesture of Parsifal. This publication highlights essential music-historical and cultural-historical connections between LICHT and Wagner's musical theater cosmos, which were encrypted by the complex reception of Wagner in the 19th and 20th centuries, and at the same time questions the image of the "break" that is said to have divided music history in two around 1950.

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