The twentieth century produced many great composers, but few who devoted as much energy to the construction and maintenance of their own persona as Karlheinz Stockhausen; instead of merely writing music, he used his dazzlingly complex and increasingly ambitious works as the building blocks for a public figure who seemed to delight in his own reputation for inaccessibility. But if ‘Karlheinz Stockhausen’ was Karlheinz Stockhausen’s greatest creation, it would not have been possible without the help of such convention-challenging works as Kontakte, Inori or, most importantly, Licht, the seven-day, thirty-hour cycle of music-theatre works that occupied him for the final three decades of his life.
Although Licht has not yet been performed as a complete cycle, each of the seven days has been heard in some form; but due to the extraordinary technical demands of each instalment, performances have remained scarce. The new production of Mittwoch aus Licht at the Deutsche Oper Berlin – which inaugurated their 2026/27 season – was, in fact, the work’s German première, and most probably the first staged performance since it first appeared in Birmingham in 2012.
While the staging, directed by , was not wholly unproblematic, a great performance from the Deutsche Oper choir, an even greater performance from a string quartet drawn from the opera’s orchestra, and the unfailing commitment of both conductor and live-sound director Florent Derex were enough to make the evening both unmissable and unforgettable.
Admittedly, if you’re the sort of person who cares about such outmoded conventions as plot, character, or even the presence of an orchestra, Mittwoch might not be for you. The constituent parts of Licht were conceived as a series of ritual performances in which singers, instrumentalists and dancers (or dancer-mimes) all play an equal role; while the cycle does contain three recurring characters – Eve, Michael and Lucifer – and is governed by a rigorous ground-plan structured according to an esoteric musical, numerological and cosmological system that only himself fully understood, the lay audience might struggle to find a through-line connecting its individual episodes.
If the diversity of formal approaches can be daunting, the fact that a number of episodes have enjoyed a parallel life as stand-alone pieces suggest that the instalments of Licht might have been conceived as a series of covert concert programmes rather than unified works of musical theatre (Michaels Reise, often performed outside of its original context, could easily be a trumpet concerto in disguise). Beyond that, there is the suspicion, however slight, that Stockhausen might just have been messing with us, throwing a camel on stage and sending a string quartet up in four separate helicopters to see how much his reputation as a mad genius would let him get away with.
The central argument against such cynical readings of Licht is that, somehow, it all works; and for anyone willing to surrender to the excesses of Stockhausen’s vision, the rewards can be great. Among other things, Stockhausen was a master of creating a sense of occasion: as with other parts of Licht, Mittwoch opens with a greeting, which, in this case, was an electro-acoustic piece (in fact the backing music for Scene 4) broadcast through eight loudspeakers arranged in the foyer of the Deutsche Oper. Instead of the usual pre-opera conversations, the room was full of people just standing and listening. The same music was also playing in the auditorium as the audience began to take their seats, and continued to play until the doors were closed, the lights were dimmed, and figures from the work started to take the stage.
Stockhausen: Mittwoch aus Licht. Maxime Pascal, conductor. Susanne Kennedy, director. Deutsche Oper Berlin, September 2026. © 2026 by Julian Roeder / Deutsche Oper Berlin.
The orchestra pit had been covered over – the opera is scored for choir, different ensembles of on-stage soloists and live-sound projection – and the front of the stage extended into the first two rows of the auditorium. At the centre of the stage was a giant stone construction with steps leading up to it, suggesting the altar of some mythical desert tribe. Behind the structure was a large projection screen constructed of smaller square LCD panels. As the audience was still coming in there was a looped video of shifting sands that was very obviously computer-generated and so completely unconvincing that it leapt straight over the uncanny valley into the realm of tacky. Throughout the evening it was the projection screen that would be responsible for the production’s most troublesome aspects … and also one of its finest moments.
Before the greeting music had ended, a group of dancer-mimes came on stage and set the scene for the arrival of the choir, whose haunting first notes were delivered from the wings, and whose sound was coloured by what sounded like digital processing, but was in fact the chirping noise of small hand-held boxes that bore a distinct resemblance to Geiger counters. Once the choir had taken their places, they welcomed the audience to Mittwoch aus Licht, explained the themes of the evening, then proceeded to engage in a dialogue on the nature of love, in which various solo voices stepped forward to posit their statements; the whole thing was directed from the stage by Deutsche Oper choir-master , who appeared in character as president of the scene’s titular ‘World Parliament’ … at least until he was replaced by the elegant Coloratura-Eve of Rachel Pinevska. The whole scene, given a majestic performance from the choir, unfolded as a largely unbroken forty-five minutes of dense, harmonically rich unaccompanied choral writing that, in addition to bringing the audience fully into the world of Mittwoch, also served as a reminder that, even without his penchant for outrageous gestures, Stockhausen would still deserve to be numbered among the great composers of the twentieth century.
The only weakness in the first scene – and one that would grow increasingly problematic in the second – came from the video imagery of the back-projections. Although the computer-generated or manipulated visuals were undoubtedly achieved through extremely advanced (and very expensive) technology, they looked not only cheap, but also curiously dated. The first scene offered a journey to the top of a very tall tower somewhere in the desert and, when it got to the top, the surrounding landscapes began to morph in an uncontrollably indecisive manner, as if the computer had been given several incompatible extremes and asked to interpolate between them at random. As the digital manipulations grew more aggressive, they started to become a detrimental force, both distracting and detracting from the fine choral work on stage.
If the projections were merely annoying in the first scene, they became close to intolerable in Scene Two, in which a series of nine instrumentalists audition for their place in the orchestra. Although the visuals did, to some extent, fulfil the demands of the text – the oboe solo took place above an urban landscape in which all buildings had been transformed into gothic cathedrals – their gaudiness frequently eclipsed the action on stage. At its best, the imagery looked like a video game from ten or fifteen years ago; at its worst – and the epilepsy-inducing bird-splosion during the flute solo was pretty much the nadir – it suggested that whoever was responsible was so drunk on the possibilities of technology that all aesthetic considerations were cast carelessly aside.
Stockhausen: Mittwoch aus Licht. Maxime Pascal, conductor. Susanne Kennedy, director. Deutsche Oper Berlin, September 2026. © 2026 by Julian Roeder / Deutsche Oper Berlin.
The fact that everything was shown in glaringly bright high-definition only made things worse: the pin-sharp clarity made the clumsy digital rendering look all the more implausible, while the constant flashing of garish colour combinations constituted a form of visual violence. In a staging that otherwise managed to capture the work’s ritual atmosphere, one couldn’t help but think how much more intense that atmosphere would have been – and how much money could have been saved – if they had simply turned the back projections off.
The presence of the projection screen, however, was completely redeemed in the third scene, which followed the second without a pause. The Helicopter String Quartet is one of Stockhausen’s most notorious creations – as the name suggests, it involves sending four string players up in four separate helicopters for around twenty minutes while they play their parts synchronised to a click track – yet the ridiculousness of the technical demands are directly proportional to the unexpectedly profound thrill of the experience. Although it was not performed ‘live’ on the evening – it would have been nearly impossible to launch four helicopters from anywhere in Charlottenburg – a recording was made especially for the production a few weeks earlier at Schönhagen airfield, just south of Berlin, and the work was prefaced using archival audio of Stockhausen’s own introduction to the world première in 1996.
The piece was otherwise performed according to its instructions: a string quartet strapped themselves into four helicopters and started to play as the rotors warmed up. On the stage, four additional screens were lowered, each one following a different musician, while the main screen showed images of and from the helicopters as they circled over Brandenburg. The playing of the strings would have been intense enough on its own, but the dense noise-floor created by the sound of four helicopters in full flight became almost ecstatically overwhelming. When the helicopters landed, the rotors slowed to a stop, and the final note from the violin faded to silence the audience exploded in wild applause.
The fourth and final scene may not have possessed the same level of excitement as the Helicopter Quartet – what could? – but it nonetheless conjured a good-natured insanity. It was perhaps the evening’s most conventional scene, in that it had vocal soloists and the outline of a narrative: a camel (in fact a costume controlled by two dancers) is elected to the presidency of an intergalactic council, whereupon it is transformed into a shortwave operator who dispenses advice to representatives from various star systems. Although the back projections were still intrusive, there was enough action on the stage to act as a counterforce; and once that action had built to its peak, it began to fade, with various figures leaving the stage until there were only six members of the choir spread throughout the auditorium who delivered the haunting final sextet. When their voices died away there was nothing left but the electro-acoustic music that had first been heard as the Mittwoch greeting, bringing what could have been a chaotic evening to a remarkably satisfying close. (Although the music was not quite over: there was an electro-acoustic ‘farewell’ awaiting the audience in the foyer as they prepared to leave the building).
If the first and third scenes had provided the evening with indisputable musical highlights, the second and fourth offered a showcase for the soloists of Ensemble Le Balcon. The second scene, scored for electro-acoustic music and nine instrumentalists, is essentially a series of virtuoso solos with a strong emphasis on extended technique; and while each one was given a strong performance, the singing flute of Charlotte Bletton, the restless trombone glides of , and Kévin Garçon’s cross between a seizure and a bass solo were especially notable. Mr Adam returned for another memorable appearance in Scene Four – in Stockhausen’s super-structure, Lucifer is associated with the trombone – although it was the precise shortwave interactions of bass that made the greatest impression.
The success of the evening, however, could not be attributed to any one performance, but to the joint effort of the singers, dancers, instrumental ensembles and musical directors who, for the span of some four and half hours, managed to create a sense of occasion while immersing the audience in Stockhausen’s vision; as with any great work of art, the constituent parts of Mittwoch, as captivating as they had been, were overshadowed by the cumulative impact of the whole. If we ever have the chance to experience the Licht cycle in its entirety, it may indeed prove to be the life-enhancing work that Stockhausen intended.
Desde 1996, informamos con independencia sobre música clásica en español.
Para disfrutar plenamente de nuestros contenidos y servicios, regístrate ahora. Solo lleva un minuto y mejora tu experiencia como lector.
🙌 Registrarse ahora
Comentarios