Born on 22 August 1928 in Mödrath, near Cologne, Karlheinz Stockhausen was the eldest of three children of Simon, a school teacher and musician who died on the Eastern Front in 1945, and Gertrud, also a musician who was “interned” in 1932 and killed in 1941. In 1951, Karlheinz Stockhausen married Doris Andreae; the couple had four children, including Markus (b. 1957) and Majella (b. 1961), who would go on to play active roles in the performance of their father’s works (playing trumpet and piano, respectively). In 1967, Stockhausen married his second wife, Mary Bauermeister, with whom he had two more children, including Simon, who would also join his father’s circle of musicians as a synthesiser player.

After an extremely difficult early life during which he studied largely in isolation, Stockhausen was admitted to the University of Cologne, where his dissertation on Bartók‘s Sonata for Two Flutes and Percussion earned him a degree with highest distinction.

Starting in 1950, Stockhausen began attending the Darmstadt Summer Courses, a veritable melting pot of musical modernity which would have a profound effect on his work. The influence of Hindemith, all-pervasive in the Germany of the late 1940s and tangible in Stockhausen’s early works (such as Chœurs and drei Lieder), was purged from the composer’s creative identity in 1951, firstly through his discovery of Schoenberg (in courses led by Leibowitz) and, more importantly, Webern (through Hermann Scherchen), and later through his contact with Messiaen, with whom he studied in Paris in 1952-53.

These revelations gave rise to a period of reflection which would fundamentally reorient his musical perspectives. The composer’s work after this period, until the end of his life, is characterised by its rigorous application of Webernian principles of deduction and organic unity (cf. Klavierstücke 1 – 4 and Kontrapunkte) and a radically new conception of musical time, as proposed by Messiaen (cf. Kreuzspiel), as well as by a sense of composition as a collective act (his first influential theoretical writings appeared in 1952), and the moral obligation, in the wake of WWII and the Holocaust, to work in a strictly rationalist manner.

The discovery of musique concrète and the work of Pierre Schaeffer in Paris (1953) inevitably oriented Stockhausen toward electronic music. He emphatically reaffirmed his creative power in Gesang der Jünglinge (1956), a major landmark in the history of electronic music; the work achieves formal unity through the gradual erosion of the heterogeneity of the starting material, and explores sonic space (cf. Kontakte, 1960) and time (cf. Hymnen, 1967).

While Stockhausen’s music ranges from scores with rigid, uncompromisingly precise notation to intuitive works in which theoretical processes are largely absent, melody, as a unifying force, is (with the exception of the intergral serialist works of the 1950s) ubiquitous. Stockhausen’s mastery of melody is especially tangible in his works after 1970, such as Mantra, and culminates in the immense seven-day opera, Licht (1977–2002). His melodic principle, the result of transcending all dialectical conflict in his work, reflects the composer’s relationship with the world, i.e., he saw himself as the most direct vector of a faith which nourished his creativity and which relentlessly sought to embody universality and peace. His final works, elements of the incomplete cycle Klang (the twenty-four hours of the day), emanate a profound peace in the face of death, with the “Veni creator” in Freude [“Joy”] (Part II), which links Stockhausen to Mahler, and the title of Part IV, Himmels-Tür (“Heaven’s Door”), being the most obvious examples.

On 5 December 2007, following some five decades dedicated to composing and promoting his work and theories (notably, starting in 1958, with teaching and lectures throughout the world), Stockhausen died in Kürten, near Cologne, in the house that he himself designed in 1965.