Karlheinz Stockhausen.Klavierstück V

Maurizio Pollini. Piano.

Klavierstück V was originally a study concentrating on flamboyantly spaced groups of grace notes centred around long "central tones". Stockhausen drastically revised and expanded this early version, bringing the grace-note groups into less extreme registers, then using the result as a background for an entirely new set of superimposed figurations based on series quite unrelated to the original material . This final version was premiered in Darmstadt by Marcelle Mercenier, together with the Klavierstücke I--IV, on 21 August 1954 . The piece is in six sections, each in a different tempo, with the fastest tempos in the middle and the slowest at the end. Each section is made up of several groups, of great variety and distinctiveness, ranging from a single, short note near the end of the sixth section to a group of forty-seven notes in the third section . In the context of this piece, a "group" is a sustained central note with grace notes before, with/around, or after it. These three possibilities are doubled to six by the use or non-use of the pedal. Stockhausen described the particular character of the groups in Klavierstück V:
a central pitch will sometimes be attacked with a very rapid group of little satellites around it, sustained with the pedal as a coloration of this central pitch, like moons around planets and planets around a sun. A specific color tints such a "head"—or core—of a sound structure, by means of the intervals of the notes which ring together.
This piece has been described as "the 1950s counterpart of a Chopin nocturne, elegant and crystalline" .