Chamber of Secrets

"Look at all the radio and television programmes, the endless series of programmes meant to explain everything about everything. Do you know what’s come into the mind of my gardener these days? He’s gone along to West German Radio and said: ‘Look, here I am. My business is gardens and I want to talk about gardening.’ I assume that the chap hasn’t done anything up to now except spend his time putting manure on my roses and looking after them and those of other employers like me; but now he’s gone up a step, and from this moment he’ll be a radio panelist. Instead of manuring and cultivating, he’ll talk about manuring and cultivating; he’ll explain how and why his tomatoes are redder and bigger than anyone else’s. In a word, endless chatter. The point is this. Can you tell me how it is that all of a sudden the craze for knowledge has sprung up, this verbal mania, while the thing that counts above all is intuition: understand the secret of a work of art and, why not, the mysteries of a rose? Excessive reasoning will end up destroying the faculty of understanding and knowing about things in depth. Words are often misleading and therefore dangerous…I’ve always believed, and I still believe, that in order to describe a bird, you first have to kill it." – Karlheinz Stockhausen

For a guy whose own published writings extend to ten volumes at present, endless chatter should hardly offend. Stockhausen could talk you into the ground, and his manner of speech was far from helpful. After his first trip to Astoria, he'd probably describe it like this, "Through a process I invented of experimenting with the New York City subway system, I have discovered a new borough called Queens." He could then regale you with separate 3-hour talks on Queens itself, the experience of discovering it, and how to use the process he'd invented.

Stockhausen was only interested in what he discovered for himself, and that insularity, coupled with the childish innocence that marks so many creative spirits, lead him to think he was discovering a lot more than he really was. That same sense of wonder made him internalize events as psychic landmarks that would re-emerge all over LICHT.

When he was all of five years old, his mentally ill mother announced that the cellar of their house was Hell and that the attic was Heaven. Sure enough, Eve would do as much in the first act of Donnerstag. During the production of that first opera, the chorus at La Scala struck over the writing in the final scene, which they felt was soloistic enough to warrant a different scale of pay. The dispute was resolved, but only after several performances of the premiere went by without that final scene.

In the final act of the follow-up, the choral strike is dramatized, replete with Italian comedian Piero Mazzarella playing the heavy. That same final scene pairs a text by St. Francis of Assisi with the coconut smashing ritual of the Kataragama festival, wherein supplicants light a coconut and throw it to the ground, hoping for it to split neatly in two as a good omen. By mashing up the ancient traditions of Catholicism, Buddhism, and Hinduism (not to mention those of striking musicians), Stockhausen creates a sort of hybrid exorcism rite that's hopped up on steroids and which climaxes with the release of a giant black bird.

The scene is so chaotic that during a performance in Holland, two animal rights activists walked off with the bird cage, intending to free it (apparently unaware that this would happen with or without their help). Stockhausen gave chase, eventually wrestling the bird cage from them, and the audience thought it was all part of the show.

The plot, as it were, centers on Lucifer, but this is Milton's Lucifer, the fallen angel, brought low by his ambition. This is the same Lucifer who shows up in the Urantia book...sort of. It's easy to see why Stockhausen would be drawn to the Urantian cosmology. Its byzantine bureaucracy puts Lucifer as one of the 'three System Sovereigns in Nebadon, the domain of Christ Michael', which contains 'ten thousand systems of inhabited worlds', of which Lucifer is 'chief executive' of 607. Stockhausen had the kind of brain that could keep that straight, if he were so inclined, but he was probably also attracted to the explanation given in the book for Lucifer's fall. "At some point in his experience he became insincere, and evil evolved into deliberate and willful sin." Insincerity is most certainly a trait Stockhausen lacked, and one he wouldn't suffer gladly.

Samstag is dominated by three massive solo works for piano, trumpet, and flute. In the opening scene, Lucifer dreams about destroying time and is bewitched by piano music. This is Stockhausen's Klavierstück XIII, and it is a doozy. The pianist has to do a great deal of vocalizing, in addition to playing all sorts of bells and strumming the strings with a bone mallet. But that's not the half of it, before K XIII is over, the pianist has played tone clusters with her ass and shot bottle rockets out of the soundboard.

This is all meant to take the piss out of extended piano techniques, and like the orchestra strike as well as countless other things in the opera, it is intended to be funny. It is a deadpan gallows humor that, again, calls Burroughs to mind. After all, K XIII bewitches Lucifer to death. No matter how obviously funny the sight of someone shooting fireworks in the middle of an opera is, it's easy to miss the joke with such a bone-dry delivery.

While it's not clear how much of the Urantian dogma Stockhausen believed, it is clear that he believed in reincarnation, or a much larger existence after death. Lucifer has only appeared to die. In the next scene, he is guided through the end of his physical existence by a tour de force for flute called Kathinka's Chant (aka Lucifer's Requiem). In it, Stockhausen mixes up the traditions of both the Tibetan and Egyptian Books of the Dead as the flutist (dressed as a cat) guides Lucifer's spirit to the afterlife.

When he reemerges onstage, he does so on stilts, and a wind ensemble is arranged on a scaffolding to look like a face. Stockhausen wanted the ensemble to move in coordinated ways that would make the face appear to dance, as though Lucifer were giving it lessons. That proved unrealistic, but the scene is an expansive big band jam, like the climax to Gruppen spread out over 20 minutes. Woven throughout is a disjointed trumpet obbligato which represents Michael's resistance to Lucifer. At one point, it seems as though Michael may win the day, but he is eventually chased offstage, which leads to the final exorcist rite.

This second installment of LICHT lead one critic to despair, "the thought of Stockhausen devoting his talent to this gargantuan pantomime for another 15 years is not a happy one." The public was grasping at straws, trying to make sense of a nonlinear narrative, searching for meaning in throwaway devices, and in the case of Samstag, wondering why the hell a La Scala premiere was being staged in a football stadium. At this point, Stockhausen was well and truly the only one in on his secret discovery: LICHT was not so much an opera cycle as it was a template for his compositional life.

It was a thematic playground for a brilliant and restless mind. Though we were all welcome to come in and play with him, it was almost as if our invitations got lost in the mail. Stockhausen seemed to sense that he was bollocks at illuminating his inner life (ten volumes notwithstanding), and it was a deficiency he'd seek to rectify in the following decade.

As a sequel, Samstag fails completely, but it is not intended to be one. Though it was written second, it is actually the final opera in the cycle, as Samstag (Saturday) is the final day in the week. Despite being chock full of astonishing music, the ultimate strangeness of the staged opera obscured the continuing quality of Stockhausen's writing. If Gesang der Junglinge, Hymnen and Mantra were wrapped into some cosmically trashy concept album (say, Kilroy Was Here), their aura would certainly dim. Such was the fate of the music from LICHT.