Herbstmusik

Herbstmusik (Autumn Music) is a music-theatre work for four performers composed by in 1974. It is Nr. 40 in his catalogue of works, and lasts a little over an hour in performance.

Herbstmusik was written in March 1974 (, 246) 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 (Griffiths 1974b, 777).

It is an early step in a series of works from the 1970s exploring theatrical elements in music, progressing from and Inori through Musik im Bauch, Atmen gibt das Leben, and , leading ultimately to the opera cycle Licht (Maconie 2005, 371; Toop 1998, 91–92).

It is the only composed example of a larger project of "scenes from daily life", itself part of an even more general Prinzip des Ganzen (holistic principle) formulated for a grand but unrealised project provisionally titled Oper (Opera), sketched in 1968–69 (Toop 1998, 100–102). 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 (Maconie 2005, 366). Stockhausen explained that, when composing this work,

I looked for a musical link between autumn and the typical sounds which accompany that season, noises with an emotive resonance, …The reassuring sound of dry leaves, the sound of rain, the sound of rotten wood crushed beneath the foot or in the hand, the distant banging when something is being nailed down. (Tannenbaum 1987, 81)

Herbstmusik was written for the Oeldorf Group, a musicians' collective founded by Stockhausen’s then assistant Péter Eötvös when he first moved from Hungary to Germany in early 1971. Stockhausen had helped him to find a farmhouse in Oeldorf, a component village of the Gemeinde Kürten, not far from Stockhausen's own home. 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. The rustic atmosphere was evidently an essential element of the work, which did not later transfer successfully to the concert hall (Kurtz 1992, 200–201).

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