Blinded By The Light

“It’s the same with all those conductors who shut themselves off from everything new. I look upon them as undertakers, exploiters of dead composers. They’re the Herods of modern music.” – Karlheinz Stockhausen

When Donnerstag aus LICHT premiered at La Scala on March 15, 1981 it was conducted by Peter Eötvös , directed by Luca Ronconi, and Stockhausen was credited with having composed the 'music, libretto, dance, actions, and gestures'. The composer sat, as per usual, in the middle of the hall, manning an enormous sound projection desk, the location a matter of utility, surely, but also a not-so-subtle illusion which made the entire production seem to materialize before its creator. The first act would only reinforce this atmosphere of megalomania as it dramatizes the deaths of Stockhausen's parents (played by Eve and Lucifer). The composer would be represented by no less than Michael the Archangel, who, in turn, is a stand-in for Christ.

The easy label for this is egocentric (and it has been unsparingly applied), but credit Stockhausen with at least having an operatic childhood. Most of us would have mini-traumas of dead goldfish and divorce to put onstage, Stockhausen's mum was euthanized by the Nazis for being mentally ill and his father died in the war. He left out his own experience tending to wounded and dying soldiers at a military hospital, but if the egoism of this prelude to LICHT is really to be considered a sin, let's bear in mind that the very act of composing is self-centered. And writing an opera after Wagner? Well, that's every composer's white whale. Stockhausen may set the bar, but he's hardly alone in the ego department.



By most accounts, the audience warmly received Donnerstag. The thought of the Stockhausen of pure electronic music, suffocating serialism, and unrepentant modernism premiering an opera on the stage at La Scala is strange indeed, almost as strange as the opera itself. To get to their seats, the audience would've had to walk past a chamber ensemble in the lobby which was playing a Thursday Greeting. Once in their seats, they would have been surrounded by a ring of speakers, which would project the voices of an Invisible Choir throughout the opera. Afterwards, trumpeters would play a Thursday Farewell from separate balconies above the theater's square.

In discussing LICHT, it's helpful to remember that opera originated as a marriage of disciplines. LICHT owes far more to Monteverdi than it does to Wagner in that sense. The chief contributor to its strangeness is the fact that Stockhausen's frame of reference is so vast. LICHT vacuums up the traditions of film, dance, mime, Western and Indian classical music, Noh theater, astrology, and Christianity, with tips of the hat to everyone from Bach to Brecht.

In Donnerstag, there are only three characters, but they each play multiple roles and have multiple identifying features. Stockhausen takes the tradition, so familiar through Bach's Passions, of pairing a solo instrument with a solo voice to the extreme. For long stretches of the opera, the only manifestation of the characters we see onstage are their instrumental doppelgangers.

Forget the leitmotif; it's for lightweights. Stockhausen's idea of total serialization is translated into a matrix of characteristics that he bestows on his three leads:

	MICHAEL	EVE	LUCIFER
Voice:	tenor	soprano	bass
Instrument:	trumpet	basset horn	trombone
Body:	dancer	dancer & speaker	dancer-mime & speaker
Primary Color:	blue	light green	ice blue & blue green
Secondary Colors:	purple & violet	off-white, opaline & silver	black green, black blue, & gray

In keeping with operatic tradition, Stockhausen's characters are well-worn archetypes, but as with a pitch set, the composer wrings as much meaning out of them as he can. Eve is not only the first woman, but she also slips into the role of Jocasta, seducing her son in the first act. Michael is at once the Archangel (Prince of Light in the apocrypha), Jesus Christ, and Stephen Dedalus. Donnerstag's loose narrative is his bildungsroman. Stockhausen would often compare these multi-layered characters to refracted light. So much of the writing in LICHT is the musical equivalent of a prism, shattering a single beam into its stunningly varied components.

After he is orphaned, Michael auditions for the conservatory, and the four-person jury is played by (who else?) Eve and Lucifer. Very rarely in the course of its three hours does Donnerstag sound like anything but a chamber opera. This economy of means is part of what many critics thought put the opera at odds with itself. In one moment, the staging is sparse, in another, absurdly grand. The entire second act is dominated by a giant globe, which opens in various spots to reveal the trumpeter Michael as he journeys around the world. A grand gesture indeed (the first of many in LICHT), but in a lowbrow visual pun, the orchestra, which sits at approximately the South Pole, are all dressed up as penguins.

From a dramatic viewpoint, the disparities continue. The odd but intelligible libretto of the first act is abandoned in the second for a completely abstract ballet set to a trumpet concerto. In the third act, snatches of scripture are sung in Hebrew and German by the invisible choirs as Michael ascends into heaven. Stockhausen summarizes the journey with an execrable acronym:

[Michael] experienced the
Melodies of CHILDHOOD with mother and father
Intensity of love through MOON-EVE
Chromaticism of the soul during EXAMINATION
Harmony of the languages on the JOURNEY AROUND THE EARTH
Audiogrammar of the emotions in the CRUCIFIXION
Ecstasy of polyphony in the ASCENSION, the
Light of the resurrection at the RETURN HOME.

The critical response to all of this was bewildered but admiring. Paul Griffiths titled his review for The Times, "A great creative mind talks to itself". He summed up the production as "an evening that is breathtakingly spectacular yet honest in taking account of the opera's discrepancies of vision and its weird mixture of cosmic imagination with juvenile smut and artistic shodiness."

Covent Garden bet on 60% of capacity when it gambled by opening its 1985-86 season with Donnerstag, and the final box office beat their wager by 20%. It is difficult to imagine an opera this bizarre captivating critics and audiences in 2007 as Donnerstag did in the early 80's. The level of engagement with Stockhausen's work puts the lie to the popular current narrative of a composer who cloistered himself in the last 30 years of his life.

As an opening salvo in a heptology, Donnerstag is a bundle of contradictions. It holds precious few clues as to what the rest of the cycle will entail, while at the same time, it neatly outlines all of its major devices. There is no cliffhanger or even dramatic tension which hints at the need for a series of sequels, yet its self-containment is clearly stretched to its limit as the opera all but bursts at its seams. For a variety of reasons, Donnerstag would be the last that most people would hear of LICHT. It is the most widely accessible of the seven operas, as it was released in a 4-disc set by Deutsche Grammophon. For most, LICHT took on the aura of a massive art project like Roden Crater after 1985, some bizarrely gigantic work that would eventually see the light of day in a few decades. Even now, four years after its completion, the entire cycle remains shrouded in mystery and most likely will for some time to come.