Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007)
Michaels Reise um die Erde (1978)
Act 2 of Donnerstag aus Licht
Opera in three acts, a greeting and a farewell
Concert performance
Karlheinz Stockhausen is considered as the inventor of pointillist music and moment form. The major representative of serialism was a pioneer of aleatoric and electronic music and also of abstract spatial composition. He acted as an unparalleled primary influence within the sphere of European post-war modernism, viewing the “zero hour” after the destruction during World War II as a historic opportunity for a radical new beginning. In his opera cycle Licht (Light), composed between 1977 and 2003 with the seven segments corresponding to the seven days of the week, he created a syncretic world theatre of creation with a total duration of around 29 hours, revolving around the archangel Michael, his adversary Lucifer and the ‘maid of the stars’ Eva in a monumental Gesamtkunstwerk of superlatives. The solo trumpet in Michaels Reise um die Erde represents the protagonist during a symbolic excursion into his own ego in which the music is a stylistic recreation of its individual stages (including Japan, Bali, India and central Africa). In Jerusalem, Michael finally encounters Eva with whom he becomes musically amalgamated in a “dense trill” (Stockhausen) in Himmelfahrt.