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Mantra (Stockhausen)

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Through Ludwig van Beethoven

History

Stockhausen had been interested for several years in writing something for the Kontarsky piano duo, and by early 1969 he had become determined to do so.) On a flight from the Northeastern United States to Los Angeles in September 1969 or shortly before, he had sketched "a kind of theater piece for two pianos" titled Vision, and in March 1970 began to work out a score, but broke off after just three pages. During an automobile trip from Madison, Connecticut to Boston, a melody came to Stockhausen, along with the idea of expanding such a musical figure over a very long period of time—fifty or sixty minutes. He jotted the melody down on an envelope at that time, but it only occurred to him after having abandoned Vision that this might become the basis for his new two-piano composition. Stockhausen later recalled that this was early in September 1969, but the sketch is in fact dated 26 February.

Later in the year, on 22 September 1969 at the Couvent d'Alziprato in southern France, he had composed an intuitive music text composition, Intervall, for two pianists playing "four-hands" (on one piano), but it did not appeal to the Kontarsky brothers—especially to Alfons, who lacked the experience his brother Aloys had gained from performing text-pieces from Aus den sieben Tagen, as a member of Stockhausen's ensemble. Intervall, eventually premiered by Roger Woodward and Jerzy Romaniuk, later became part of Stockhausen's second cycle of intuitive-music compositions, Für kommende Zeiten.

Stockhausen mentioned his wish to write something for the Kontarsky brothers to Heinrich Strobel, director of the Music Division of the SWF Baden-Baden and artistic director of the Donaueschinger Musiktage für Zeitgenossische Tonkunst and, toward the end of 1969, Strobel commissioned a work for two pianos for the 1970 Donaueschingen Festival. After abandoning Vision, Stockhausen took up the melody he had jotted down the previous September and on its basis made a form plan and laid out the new work's skeleton between 1 May and 20 June 1970 in Osaka, Japan. He then completed the score in an unbroken stretch of work at his home in Kürten from 10 July to 18 August 1970. Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky gave the premiere of Mantra in Donaueschingen on 18 October 1970, and made the first recording of the work from 10 to 13 June 1971 at the Tonstudio Kreillerstraße 22 in Munich, for Deutsche Grammophon. The score first appeared in print only in 1975, as one of the first publications of the composer's newly founded Stockhausen-Verlag.

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