TY - JOUR
AU - Miller, Paul, V.
AB - Although all seven operas in Stockhausen’s epic Licht cycle have now been staged, it is still rare to experience one live.1 Tellingly, a Stockhausen opera has never yet enjoyed successive performances in two major houses in consecutive years. Following two runs at the Theater Basel in 2016, Donnerstag aus Licht (Thursday from Light) is tentatively scheduled for performance in Paris at the Opéra-Comique in November 2017. Along with his tightly knit inner circle of collaborators, the composer himself oversaw past productions of Donnerstag. In Basel, Kathinka Pasveer, Lydia Steier, and Barbara Ehnes played leading roles as sound director, dramaturge, and stage designer, respectively, while Titus Engel conducted the Symphony Orchestra of Basel and the Choir of the Basel Theater. The 2017 Paris production will feature a dynamic group of young musicians from the group “Le Balcon,” conducted by Maxime Pascale. Met with impassioned, partisan approbation and condemnation, the Basel performance of Donnerstag stirred more controversy than might be expected. In particular, Lydia Steier’s staging caused a great deal of ire in the Stockhausen community. Thomas Ulrich, a Berlin theologian and musicologist who served as dramaturge in the Cologne opera’s 2011 performance of Sonntag, and whose extensive scholarly writings on Stockhausen have won admiration on both sides of the Atlantic, came out against Steier’s production. Ulrich lamented that her staging lost sight of Stockhausen’s universal ambitions and “reduce[d] the opera to a pathological life-story of an individual person.”2 Others viewed Steier’s design as letting a much-needed breath of fresh air into a work that has grown up and begun to have a life of its own, gaining independence from the composer’s inner circle. Writing for the Neue Züricher Zeitung, Michelle Ziegler suggested that Steier’s production “turns away from compulsive faithfulness of the first Stockhausen interpreters, and makes the way clear for new interpretative approaches.”3 Regardless of what one thought of Steier’s staging, praise for the musical and vocal outcome of the Basel performance, under the direction of Pasveer and Engel, was almost unanimously positive. Georg Rudiger from the Neue musikalische Zeitung wrote that “the balance between playing tapes and live and sung music is perfect…. One hears, looks, and is amazed.”4 If one could draw a dividing line, those more familiar with the musical content generally criticized the performance, while those who were relatively new to the music supported the new theatrical conception. First heard almost forty years ago, Donnerstag was the initial installment of Stockhausen’s Licht heptalogy, which occupied the composer’s attention from 1977 until 2003. Donnerstag concerns the Gestalt-character Michael, a heroic angel in human form. Semi-autobiographical in its opening act, the opera begins with a series of troubling family scenes drawn from Stockhausen’s own memories growing up under the Nazi regime. The composer identified himself at some level with the protagonist Michael. Stockhausen’s mother (who was euthanized by the Nazis in 1941) embodies the Eve Gestalt, and his father (sent to the eastern front in 1945 and never heard from again) is personified by Lucifer. The young Michael discovers eroticism through an unexpected visit from an alluring basset-hornist, Mondeva (Moon-Eve), in an eponymous scene. Michael then presents a successful audition at the conservatory as a singer, trumpeter, and dancer together. Donnerstag’s second act, entitled Michaels Reise (Michael’s Journey) takes the form of an enormous trumpet concerto: surprisingly, there is no singing in this part of the opera. Michael travels around the world, stopping in various places before a pair of clarinetists mocks him and threatens crucifixion. He ascends, returning to his celestial home in act 3. Here, Michael successfully battles a dragon (represented by a tap-dancing trombonist), endures a verbal onslaught by Lucifer (who hid in a tuba), and explains in a closing monologue that it was his love for humankind that motivated him to visit Earth and help develop humanity’s consciousness. Through its scenic action, Donnerstag subtly traverses a metaphysical path from the worldly to the otherworldly, an expanding sonic space from chamber opera through instrumental concerto to oratorio, and a human plane from the autobiographical to the universal. Along the way, Stockhausen integrates everything from the deadly fascist euthanasia program to offbeat comedy into a three-hour spectacle that does not end when the curtain goes down, but rather when five trumpeters, standing on rooftops outside the opera house, slowly repeat segments of the Michael formula for about a half hour.5 The very audaciousness of it all must be one of the reasons why this work has attracted so much recent interest. Curiously, its revival may also indicate the emergence of a peculiar cyclic tendency in the nature of Licht’s performance history: now that all seven operas have been heard, could it be that we are returning to the beginning of the cycle? Whatever the reason for the upswell of interest in Donnerstag, it is not hard to see why Steier’s conception incited rancor: she significantly recast scenic instructions in Stockhausen’s score that have been considered sacrosanct to some. Although critics mounted pejorative catcalls of “Regietheater,” Steier’s choices deserve serious examination. One of the more significant alterations was the reconceptualization of the lengthy second act as a kind of “Escape from the Sanatorium” effort. In Stockhausen’s original concept, a large globe on stage with various realistic continents represents Michael’s travels around the world.6 As the globe spins, Michael steps out of a series of doors, which correspond geographically to the stations on his “Journey Around the Earth.” All the while, Michael’s music becomes more elaborate and ornamented, until Mondeva appears again and the two perform a duet in which their characteristic melodic material intertwines. After Michael’s mockery by two clarinet players dressed as swallows and a pair of trombonists, the stage goes dark and Michael ascends.7 Inspired partly by the 1975 film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which a mentally competent inmate transfers himself to an institution hoping that he may serve out his prison sentence in a more amenable environment, Steier conceived of Michael’s journey transpiring inside a sanatorium. Noting that all too often the most gifted individuals among us traverse a narrow path between genius and insanity, her basic approach was not unreasonable. But more controversially, Steier suggested that Michael’s journey is a hallucination, aided by psychotic drugs: a “trip” in an inward sense. According to Steier’s notes, the sanatorium stood symbolically as a midway point between the traumatic events of Michael’s childhood and his triumphant return home.8 Instead of a spinning globe to guide us visually, enormous video projections by Chris Kondek illustrated stereotypical scenes from each waypoint on Michael’s journey—an animated Godzilla sequence for Japan, a wildlife documentary for “central Africa,” and a looping split-screen dance sequence for Bali.9 The videos above the stage (which often introduced a distinctly camp element into the production) pulled attention away from Michael and the action going on below, and consequently reduced the effect of the extraordinary music and the centrality of the main character. Below the projections, Michael ran down institutional hallways, trying to escape from clipboard-wielding doctors wearing white lab coats and stethoscopes. The medical profession finally gained the upper hand: lashed to a gurney, Michael received electroshock therapy, complete with electrodes and strobe effects. Perhaps the enormous risk Steier took in recasting Michaels Reise was not without some genuine payoff: the representation of Michael’s antagonists as members of the medical profession cannot help but arouse some sympathy, for who has not suffered at the hand of doctors? Here, Steier most clearly revealed her fundamental rethinking of the Michael Gestalt: while Stockhausen understood him as a powerful spirit-force without mortal flaws, Steier humanizes him so that his ascent in the third act only comes after a series of “dark tests.”10 Some would argue that human flaws are not part of Michael’s essential character. As Joe Drew writes, Michael is essentially “an angel in human form”; following this logic, humanizing him only debases his spiritual purity.11 In their staging, the Basel team dared to probe a central question in the whole concept of interpretation, one which is particularly germane to Stockhausen’s oeuvre: to what degree does the composer wield authority over the realization of their work? Unlike most opera composers, Stockhausen believed that many details not ordinarily considered “essential” were important for a successful performance. There were good reasons for his instance on this, not least of which was his ambition to integrate as much of the universe as possible into his operatic microcosmos. For example, days of the week have specific associations with scents, colors, elements, and graphic symbols. Consequently, there are often very specific instructions on the appearance and action on stage. Take, for instance, the instructions in the score for act 1, scene 2, where Mondeva, the mysteriously erotic basset-horn playing creature, encounters young Michael. The score reads: At the back—an arcade of young green and somewhat transparent birch-trees. In front of them, long-stemmed blue flowers. In between the birch-trees—at first sight hardly recognizable—stands a fabulous creature, with moon-like face, silver beak, a basset horn in its mouth, seven long bird-claws on each hand and five extra long claws on each bird’s foot; it has blue-green plumage, female breasts, their tips revealed; abdomen and legs are smooth and snake-like; it has a magnificent bird’s tail. The creature moves jerkily a few times, otherwise stands motionlessly.12 In the Basel production, Mondeva wore a large white dress that lacked most of the details specified in the score. Yet Stockhausen’s concept of Mondeva’s peculiar costume, her plumage, and her gestural language no less than her musical utterances, are deeply entwined with other symbolic elements of the Licht cycle. For example, the “blue-green” feathers and the colors of the foliage are obvious references to the principal colors associated with Michael and Eve. Further connections arise from imagining possible relationships between Donnerstag and the other Licht operas. To one familiar with the development of Stockhausen’s symbolic language, the birdlike details might suggest a connection to a particular scene, “Fall,” in the Freitag opera, where the sounds of nocturnal birds can be heard as Caino, a character associated with Lucifer, seduces Eve. The fact that birds are associated with both scenes strengthens this relationship between the operas. During “Mondeva,” the flowers on stage might also trigger an association with the “Blumenberg,” a mountain of flowers that Stockhausen specified as one of the ritual elements of “Engel-Prozessionen,” a scene from the Sonntag opera that celebrates the “mystical union” between Michael and Eve. Aspects of the scenic design of “Donnerstag Gruss” also caused controversy in Basel. Stockhausen imagined that this half-hour introduction would transpire in the foyer of the house before the opera itself began in the main hall. The music, played mostly on brass instruments, introduces the main Michael formula. In Basel, the production team paid homage to a late 1970s lounge band, dressing the performers in colorful plush velour suits and distributing tumblers of fake whisky and theatrical cigarettes to them to suggest a wigged-out atmosphere: the performers’ movements, slow and somewhat halting, evoked spaced-out stoners and groggy junkies. Although the originality of this scenic manifestation was entertaining, the novelty wore off as the incongruity of Stockhausen’s musical style and the imagined performance venue collided head-on. On the other hand, the performers themselves—most were students at the local conservatory—played with astonishing precision, making their pretend inebriation vibrate even more dissonantly with the nuanced acoustic landscape. These examples illustrate that significantly altering one thing in a Stockhausen opera can cause discord that resonates beyond the particular work or scene in question. For those few who are familiar with the subtle connections among operas, the loss of those links can seem like a loss of content; it was, after all, not just the “things themselves” that interested Stockhausen but also the relationship between those things that greatly occupied his musical and dramatic mind. Because of the composer’s well-documented legacy, the main dilemma facing new Stockhausen productions will be deciding how strong an influence past productions will exert. How can stage designers negotiate these works’ past histories while speaking to future generations by adapting Stockhausen’s symbolic language to contemporary discourses? This brings us to the much-debated concept of Werktreue, a subject deemed so important to the Basel performance that a text addressing it appeared in the program booklet as a part of the interview between Kathinka Pasveer and Pavel Jiracek. It is easy to become confused in this respect because Stockhausen granted considerable license to interpreters at other stages of his career. In his scores of the 1960s, pieces such as Kurzwellen and Prozession consisted of almost nothing but plus, minus, and equal signs; the performers were to fill in the details themselves according to various guidelines. The abrupt reappearance of a fixed, “composed” working method occurred in 1970 with Mantra, when Stockhausen returned to notating scores in a more conventional way. The Licht operas all fall into the post-Mantra category. According to Pasveer, “Stockhausen was very precise with regard to his works. He worked very hard for a long time, until every note found a place where it was supposed to be. He always said, ‘If you want to do it differently, it's better to do something that is entirely your own.’”13 In fact, Stockhausen’s opera scores often include so many details—even down to the elaborate hand gestures—that at least one critic openly accused him of “megalomania.”14 It is important to remember that Stockhausen was certainly not the first to demand adherence to the written notation. But because of the extent to which Steier and the Basel team reimagined Donnerstag, it may very well be that their staging marks the moment when Licht has moved into a new period in its performance history in which it has begun to have a life of its own, shedding some of its original, experimental character and taking on some of the features of a (experimental) canonical work. Whatever objections one may lodge against it, the Basel production may ultimately augur well for the cycle’s future since a work that means nothing to its audience will never stimulate voices as passionate as those that were raised. In another part of Europe, a talented group of Parisian musicians has assembled a credible performing force and hopes to present Donnerstag at the newly renovated Opéra-Comique in November 2017. As core members of the group called “Le Balcon,” these young artists have already posted impressive video excerpts of Donnerstag on YouTube. Nine soloists have been refining their performance by successfully producing children’s shows for the last few months in the lower foyer of the Salle Favart. The idea that children would be responsive to Stockhausen’s music may strike some as absurd, but it really works: the French grade-schoolers I observed were gleefully clicking their tongues along with the soloists and singing the Michael formula on their way home. In Basel, the enormous physical resources behind the stage made an elaborate, scenic production possible. The current plans for the Opéra-Comique apparently call for the orchestra to be mostly on stage during Donnerstag. Nevertheless, the amount of time, effort, and thought that the Balcon musicians have already invested into this opera is substantial and impressive. Perhaps the Paris team will show an alternative way forward as Stockhausen’s operas move through their adolescence and into adulthood. What lies in the more distant future for Stockhausen’s massive twenty-nine-hour operatic legacy? Drawing upon material from all seven Licht installments, the Dutch National Opera and the Holland Festival plan to present three consecutive days of musical extracts in 2019. Led by Peter Audi and Ruth MacKenzie, the team hopes to “represent the full palette of Stockhausen’s expressive means.”15 A special two-year Master’s degree program at The Hague, led by Kathinka Pasveer, will help train musicians in Stockhausen’s performance practice. Due to economic challenges, political machinations, and even Stockhausen’s own controversial comments, previous performances of Licht operas have sometimes been cancelled. If the financial resources and institutional commitment to Stockhausen’s stellar creations hold up, more adventures into outer space await those ready to take the leap. Footnotes " Paul Miller studied with Stockhausen for six summers in Küten and premiered the viola version of his solo piece In Freundschaft. He holds degrees from Vassar College and the Eastman School of Music, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2009. An active performer of both Baroque and new music, Paul currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he teaches at Duquesne University. " 1. Donnerstag was premiered at La Scala (1981) and revived at Covent Garden (1985); Samstag at La Scala (1984), Montag also at La Scala (1988); Dienstag at the Leipzig Opera (1993), Freitag also in Leipzig (1996); Sonntag in Cologne (2011); and Mittwoch in Birmingham (2012). " 2. Thomas Ulrich, blog post,www.stockhausen-forum.de/t143f6-DONNERSTAG-aus-LICHT-in-Basel-June.html, accessed May 3, 2017. " 3. “Sie wendet sich von der zwanghaften Gläubigkeit der ersten Stockhausen-Interpreten ab und macht den Weg frei für neue Deutungsansätze.” Neue Züricher Zeitung, June 23, 2016, www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/buehne/stockhausens-donnerstag-aus-licht-in-basel-endlich-vom-glauben-abfallen-ld.91252, accessed May 3, 2017. This and all other translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. " 4. “Die Balance zwischen den Zuspielbändern und der live gespielten und gesungenen Musik ist perfekt…. Man hört, schaut und staunt.” nmz online, June 26, 2016, www.nmz.de/online/auf-die-erde-gestellt-karlheinz-stockhausen-donnerstag-aus-licht-am-theater-basel, accessed May 3, 2017. " 5. More than just a melody, a formula contains characteristic rhythms, timbres, articulations, and ornaments associated with one of Stockhausen’s three main Gestalt-characters. Jerome Kohl, “Into the Middleground: Formula Syntax in Stockhausen’s Licht,” Perspectives of New Music 28, no. 2 (1990): 262–91. " 6. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte zur Musik, vol. 9 (Kürten: Stockhausen Verlag, 1998), 207–48. In the 1985 Covent Garden production, spherical metal scaffolding represented the globe; neon signs indicated the locations where Michael descended. " 7. Donnerstag aus Licht, Covent Garden program book (Harlow, Essex: Shenval Print Ltd., 1985). " 8. “In Verbindung mit den Medikamenten, die Patienten einnehmen, entwickelt sich daraus für Michael ein halluzinatorischer Trip, der tief in seine eigene Psyche führt.” In “Das Trauma einer Generation,” interview with Lydia Steier, Titus Engel, and Barbara Ehnes, with Pavel B. Jiracek, Donnerstag aus Licht, program book (Basel Opera, 2016), 15–16. " 9. Some of these video sequences may have resonated unintentionally with Stockhausen’s own experience, e.g., the composer was familiar with Cartier-Bresson’s book on the dances of Bali. Stockhausen, Texte zur Musik, vol. 5 (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1989), 221. " 10. Basel program book (2016), 15. " 11. Joe Drew, “Michael from Light: A Character Study of Stockhausen’s Hero” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2014), 183. " 12. Covent Garden program book (1985), trans. Irina Brown. " 13. “Stockhausen war sehr präzise, was seine Werke betrifft: Er hat so lange getüftelt und geprobt, bis jede Note sass, wo sie sein sollte…. Er hat immer gesagt, ‘Wenn ihr es anders machen wollt, dann macht doch lieber etwas Eigenes.’” Basel program book (2016), 35–36. " 14. Ivan Hewett, “Stockhausen: A Sage Undone by Megalomania,” The Telegraph, October 20, 2005, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/3647308/Stockhausen-a-sage-undone-by-megalomania.html, accessed May 7, 2017. " 15. www.operaballet.nl/en/node/5534, accessed May 9, 2017. The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - PerformanceStockhausen in Basel and Paris: Donnerstag in a New Light
JF - The Opera Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/oq/kbx013
DA - 2016-12-31
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/performancestockhausen-in-basel-and-paris-donnerstag-in-a-new-light-Rp171Fft4z
SP - 321
VL - 32
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -