The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen remained to the end of his life a deeply controversial figure. The cosmic pretensions of his operatic cycle Licht, to which he devoted all his creative energies from 1977, caused as much wonder and scepticism as the striking newness of the first works he had performed at the beginning of the 1950s.

What cannot be doubted, however, is the single-mindedness with which, in a doubting age, he gave himself to the grand design. Works from all periods in his life are most characteristically presented as whole worlds of sound, developed according to original criteria with little regard for tradition. In part this came about because he was one of the first musicians to work naturally with electronic resources, which were part of his equipment almost from the first.

But he could not have sustained his role as dispenser of new visions without support. He was fortunate, very early in his career, to win the confidence of influential radio directors in West Germany, and to be accepted by his colleagues as a pathbreaker. In later years, when sympathy from these quarters grew more equivocal, he created his own environment near Cologne where he could operate as magus, surrounded by people concerned with performing, publishing and documenting his music.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was born in 1928 in Mödrath, a village in the Cologne area; both his parents were killed during the war. Between 1947 and 1951 he studied at the Musikhochschule in Cologne, where he had composition lessons with Frank Martin, though at this stage he would seem to have been set for a career as a school music teacher. The sudden forging of his creativity came at the Darmstadt summer course of 1951, when he encountered Messiaen's speculative 12-note construction Mode de valeurs et d'intensitées and talked about the piece with other young composers who were present, notably Luigi Nono and Karel Goeyvaerts.

Related Internet Links

• Watch Stockhausen interview

• Watch Helicopter String Quartet

• Stockhausen Foundation

Then and Now

Following the death of Karlheinz Stockhausen, we look back to Andrew Porter's 2000 review of concerts dedicated to "three young heroes of the 1950s"

He returned to Cologne and that autumn composed his Kreuzspiel, an abstract musical process played out by the unusual ensemble of piano, oboe, bass clarinet and three percussionists.

Early in 1952 he went to Paris to study with Messiaen, and also to work in the musique concrète studio directed by Pierre Schaeffer. This gave him his first taste of electronic music; he also wrote two large orchestral works, Spiel and Punkte, besides a set of piano pieces and the highly important Kontra-Punkte for ten instruments. As its name implies, this work was written against the prevailing Messiaen-influenced style of treating each note as a separate point of sound — the style of Kreuzspiel and of the works being written at this time by a colleague Stockhausen had met in Paris, Pierre Boulez. In Kontra-Punkte he worked instead with “groups”, bunches of notes defined by rhythm, intervallic character and instrumentation.

In 1953 he returned to Cologne to start work at the new electronic music studio run by the radio station, where he produced two studies in synthesized sound and then Gesang der Jünglinge (1956), a classic of the genre combining synthetic sounds with recordings of a boy's voice.

Meanwhile, work in the electronic medium made him more conscious of the special characteristics of live musical performance: the rhythm of breathing that he drew into Zeitmasze for five woodwind (1955-56), and the drama boldly handled in Gruppen for three orchestras around the audience (1955-57). He also, in Klavierstück XI (1956) composed one of the first European works in which the performer is left to choose the order of events.

With these works, and through his teaching at Darmstadt every year from 1953, Stockhausen established his authority among the leaders of the avant-garde, and his compositional voice became more confidently public. In Kontakte (1958-60) he produced a sound spectacle for pianist and percussionist working within and around richly textured music on tape, and in Momente (1962-64) he created a celebratory cantata for soprano, choir, brass, percussion and electronic organs, a hymn to existence in the moment and forgetfulness of the past.

The complexity of these scores was gradually dismantled during the next few years. Partly under the influence of Eastern thought — a long stay in Japan in 1966 was crucial — Stockhausen came to give more emphasis to momentary inspiration and less to preplanning: accordingly he abandoned traditional notation for simple signs or prose poems suggesting basic processes or moods. At the same time, the centre of his music became his work with his own live electronic ensemble, for whom he wrote Mikrophonie I (1964), Prozession (1967) and Kurzwellen (1968), the last of these opening itself to the hazards of what the players pick up on shortwave receivers. Alternatively, in Stimmung for six vocalists (also 1968) there was an hour-long meditation on the overtones of a single note.

But in 1970 Stockhausen abruptly returned to normal notation in his Mantra for two pianists and electronics; a work that laid the ground rules for his subsequent output. All the detail in the composition is derived from a melodic “formula” and the concert presentation of the work is solemnly ritualised. After this came Trans (1971), the transcription of a dream for an orchestra seen behind a purple gauze, and Inori (1973-74), an immense piece in which the orchestral gestures are embodied in the hieratic poses of one or two dancers. Then Sirius (1975-76) was offered as a play of the zodiac enacted on Earth by four musicians from outer space.

The Licht project, which purports to deal with life, death, Man and salvation in a universal setting, arose naturally from this. There are three main characters, or principles: Michael, the hero and redeemer; Eva, the mother and consort; and Lucifer, the spirit of negation. All of them, in guises as singers, instrumentalists and dancers, were to have been invoked during the course of a week-long ceremonial,

The full impact of the Licht cycle was not to be experienced, however. Donnerstag, Samstag and Montag were premiered in Milan between 1981 and 1988, and Dienstag and Freitag in Leipzig in 1993 and 1996. The main question left by Stockhausen's death must be the status of the remaining instalments, Mittwoch and Sonntag. Had he lived, the latter would surely have been his crowning achievement.

A feature of the Licht cycle was the particular attention he paid to the spatial positioning of his performers, with sounds often emanating from the rooftops and foyers of the opera house. This tendency reached its extreme in the notorious Helikopter-Streichquartett from Mittwoch, in which the music is played by each of the string quartettists from an airborne helicopter and relayed to the listeners through screens and loudspeakers.

As Stockhausen became more absorbed in his Licht cycle, he travelled less widely, devoting much time, alongside his extended family, to the award-winning publishing house, Stockhausen-Verlag, that he set up in 1972 after his break with Universal Edition, and the extensive CD edition of his complete works. Never the most worldly of men, he achieved a degree of notoriety in 2001 when he appeared to have described the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon as “a work of art”. He apologised, explaining that the words had been taken out of context, but performances of his works in Hamburg were cancelled.

Stockhausen was twice married: in 1951 to Doris Andreae by whom he had three daughters and one son, and in 1967 to Mary Bauermeister, by whom he had one daughter and one son. Three of his children became performers of his music, his elder son, Markus, taking the role of Michael as trumpeter in all performances of the two completed operas from Licht.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, composer, was born on August 22, 1928. He died on December 5, 2007, aged 79