Reception
Notwithstanding Stockhausen's planned but unrealised fifth region, composer Konrad Boehmer, a staunch Marxist, castigated Hymnen on political grounds, claiming that its use of anthems primarily from capitalist and fascist nations presents "emblems" indicating the composer's political alignment (Boehmer 1970, 137). He calls the utopian realm of Hymunion "irrational petty-bourgeois supra-nationality" (Boehmer 1970, 140).
Robin Maconie, on the contrary, regards any apparent political message as superficial, with less significance for younger audiences than for listeners who remember the student uprisings, Viet Nam, and other issues of mass protest from the time when Hymnen was composed, holding that the musical meaning of Stockhausen's chosen material is not what those sounds might represent, but what they are acoustically (Maconie 2005, 275).
Johannes Fritsch calls Hymnen a "masterpiece", comparable to Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Mahler's Eighth Symphony, and Schönberg's Moses und Aron (Fritsch 1976, 262). Maconie concurs, while pointing out that the conventional symphony's reliance on instruments and tempos (as points of reference), and on themes and key changes (as variables) are replaced in Hymnen with the anthems and with "ways of hearing", respectively. These ways of hearing include the discovery of highly accelerated events in the midst of very slow ones, or elements of stasis in a context of extreme turbulence; sometimes the anthems are only glimpsed, or become hidden, are overlaid, or broken into fragments and recombined. The result can be interpreted as "a magisterial response from the German musical and intellectual tradition to a US cold war agenda of speech recognition and translation", that at the same time "comprehensively addresses the same underlying issues of melody synthesis by interpolation and substitution programming" (Maconie 2005, 278, 280).
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