Adieu, Nr. 21

In June 1966 the oboist Wilhelm Meyer, who had frequently performed Stockhausen's earlier quintet Zeitmaße under the composer's direction, asked Stockhausen to compose a new wind quintet for an upcoming tour of Asia. Stockhausen initially demurred because a new quintet would probably take months to compose, and the current production of Hymnen in the Cologne electronic studio was taking up all of his time. A visit made a few days later to a comprehensive exhibition in The Hague of Piet Mondrian's paintings made Stockhausen ask himself, when confronted with Mondrian's well-known series of paintings titled simply "compositions"—with their strict organization by vertical and horizontal lines dividing the canvasses into rectangles—why it should be necessary to take months of concentrated work to produce a piece. Recalling also that Meyer's son Wolfgang Sebastian, an organist who not long before had asked Stockhausen to compose an organ piece, had been killed in a car crash on 10 January 1966, he immediately set to work on the new quintet in memory of the oboist's son, and completed it two days later. There were two unofficial performances, in Calcutta on 30 January and in Hong Kong on 6 February, before the "official premiere" on 10 February 1967 in Tokyo by the WDR Wind Quintet (Stockhausen 1971).