Brain Readjustment, Courtesy of Karlheinz S.

Odd that two very different sources would reference Stockhausen's 9/11 comments today. From Mother Box:

In what follows, I would like to pursue a line suggested by a remark by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in reference to 9-11: his much-quoted comment that it was “the greatest work of art of all time.”

Despite the repellent nihilism that is at the base of Stockhausen’s ghoulish aesthetic judgment, it contains an important insight and comes closer to a genuine assessment of 9-11 than the competing interpretation of it in terms of Clausewitzian war. For Stockhausen did grasp one big truth: 9-11 was the enactment of a fantasy — not an artistic fantasy, to be sure, but a fantasy nonetheless.

From Osvaldo Golijov:

I don't know if you remember around that time, there was this horrible controversy generated by Karlheinz Stockhausen, when he said that the terrorists actually mounted the greatest opera of all time, because they rehearsed and it ended in death. It always disturbed me, what he said. But our friend Peter Sellars once said, "You know what's the beauty of opera? It's that at the end the dead rise and take a bow." And that is why Stockhausen is wrong. An operatic gesture is not the one that destroys the most; it's the one that allows for learning.

Still with this nonsense? The story was as misreported as WMD's in Iraq. Just as no educated person would still insist that Saddam (may he rest in peace) was sitting on stockpiles of mustard gas or that the smoking gun could, in fact, be a mushroom cloud, no one who continues to condemn Stockhausen's 9/11 comment can be taken seriously on the subject.

To recap, Stockhausen's spent the last three decades of his life writing the most monumental work in the history of classical music, a 7-opera cycle whose main characters are Michael, Eve, & Lucifer. He's a deeply religious man, and clearly, much involved with his operatic subject. So, when, in the course of an interview, the question was posed of whether or not these characters are merely historical figures, Stockhausen insisted they were not.

As evidence that Lucifer is not simply the fellow who offered Jesus some junk in the desert, he pointed to 9/11. (Lucifer is alive and well and compelling people to fly planes into buildings.) As a man who has written seven massive operas on the subject, he understandably delved a little deeper. It was his discussion of Lucifer's motivation that garnered the infamous comment,

"What happened there is - now you must readjust your brain - the biggest artwork of all times. That spirits achieve in a single act what we in music cannot dream of, that people rehearse ten years long like mad, totally fanatical for a concert and then die. This is the biggest artwork that exists at all in the whole universe... I couldn't match it. Against that, we - as composers - are nothing."

No one in the room misunderstood what he meant, but the antagonistic streak in European journalism quickly whipped up a storm in a teacup by stripping the quote of any context, which was, to be fair, a press conference for the Hamburg Music Festival.

It's tough to picture anything approaching this scenario happening in America. (Remember how shocking it was to see that Irish reporter put the screws to Bush?) If you held a press conference with John Adams, you'd be lucky to have people show up.

Complete Stockhausen 9/11 Hobby Kit: Transcript of Press Conference (German), Stockhausen's Response to the Controversy, Suzanne Stephens' Account of the Press Conference