Stockhausen's Spaceship

[Cato]

I thought it might be time to review some of my earliest articles about Stockhausen, specifically one from 1987 on one of the LICHT operas, when the cycle was still under construction.

I have translated an article from the German magazine Der Spiegel from around 1987.  (Exact issue date is gone.)

Note it is written by the editor himself.


"With Hitler and a Bow-Wow into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land
Spiegel Editor Klaus Umbach on Karlheinz Stockhausen's new opera Montag aus Licht

Like a lord, with curly hair down to his shoulders, he sits enthroned in the glow of spotlights 5 meters above the earthly stage.  His bright shirt is colorfully knitted, his trousers blossom white.  You cannot help but look at him: Karlheinz Stockhausen, 59, a figure of En-Light-enment for the contemporary electronic music scene.

With big eyes full of transfigured delight, this composer on the podium of the Cologne Philharmonic, a man who spiritually is able "to leave my body and observe it as if it were an automobile," pursues a kind of neocreation of creativity: his work.  And he saw, that it was good.

Among "21 musical performers,", small ensembles of singers, children's choirs, traditional and electronic sound generators, among the cries of babies, goats bleating, and the beat of a cuckoo clock, 3 women named after the primeval mother Eve shriek through a squadron of giant loudspeakers "Huvva Luhudens" and "Akka Aditi", at which point a choir, after a hymn to God as an "immeasurable Intelligence" monosyllabically chants a response: "Michi Michikiki niminimi."

Then a "Birthday Aria" ("Parrot aye Parakeet Bow Wow!") is to be understood, according to a published exegesis by Stockhausen himself, that Heaven has bestowed Life to 7 "Animal boys" and to 7 Dwarfs: "Luci-cat, Wee-wee-grimace, Penis-treasure, Birdie-boobs, Johnny Top, Manny-Tickle-Deer, and Little Brat."

In grateful joy: 3 sailors gargle – according to the score – the sounds "a---öäua aö oöa oa ua" and then "ruketu Urt Werdani," spitting out the water in high arches.

Up until then it had been a really colorful evening!

But then Hell bursts out in Stockhausen's Eden.  Luci-Polyp steps out in the forms of 2 Beelzebubs and rattles down the alphabet "from A-fa and Be-fa to Upsilon-fa and Zee-fa." Then an alarm clock goes off, and Adolf Hitler snores an historic O-tone, so that "we shoot back to 5:45 A.M.," a crowd of men shout "Hail!" and a toilet flushes from an 8-track tape directed by 40 channels of sound.  Aha!  Creation is excrement, the miscarriage must go through the toilet back to a mother's lap.

On to something new: a flock of lovely maidens prophesies "sea Samudra Ice," apparently the code of an exotic genetic technology.  Because immediately a pair of rough chords occur on Eva's Steinway ("Fertilization with Piano Piece"), the birth proceeds ("frai dai dai vae") crazily fast, and already they are in the world of Karlheinz Stockhausen: "seven boys of the days," "healthier and more beautiful human beings," monstrosities of a composing visionary, who long ago lifted off into the cloud-cuckoo-land of his own crazy-quilted private philosophy.

So ("sonono nononono no") this is the way things have been screaming with birth-pangs since 1977, and it will continue in installments until the next century, if the powers of inspiration remain whole for the creator.  Then it shall completely enlighten mankind: Stockhausen's LIGHT, the most monumental and monomaniacal undertaking in Western Musical History, a cycle of operas structured and named after the days of the week, 5 times greater than all of Beethoven' symphonies together, and at more than 30 hours a Colossus of Time, compared to which Wagner's Ring tetralogy is a "a cute little chamber opera" (the newspaper Kölnische Rundschau).

At the beginning of April Stockhausen oversaw at the control panel the concert premiere of his latest piece Montag aus Licht.  On Saturday of this week Michael Bogdanov, Hamburg's designated theater director, is arranging a premiere at La Scala of Donnerstag aus Licht via his previous London staging.

For over 4 hours this syllabic and sibylline  "Play of Light" winds around out of the incense from Poona and Oberammergau, from the Bible, legends, the vocabulary of children's books, and the coffee grounds of Erich von Däniken (Note: a pseudo-scientist who claimed he had evidence of extra-terrestrial landings in ancient times), leading to the heights of the Bergisch Land and Kürten 5067 (Note: Stockhausen's town and zip code), where Stockhausen has his center, a man who claims "not to be necessarily identical to Stockhausen the composer."

Here at the address of Kettenberg 15, a green hill of electronic music astrology, he could listen in on "the 12 melodies of the zodiac"  as well as perceiving the vibrations of Sirius, the "central sun of our area of the Universe," over 8.7 light-years away, "the highest form of oscillations," under whose influence he went from new-sound revolutionary to a new-age softie, and from a philharmonic terror of the middle-class to the supernova of a messianically turned community.

Whether as a pioneer at the podium or the music mixer or as Heaven's loudspeaker, he always stood at the center.  His work Kreuzspiel caused a scandal in 1952 at the Darmstadt New Music Festival.  His Gesang der Jünglinge almost became a classic.  He created by his own estimation the first works of purely electronic music in 19534 at the WDR studios.  The Beatles even honored him with his portrait on the album cover of Sergeant Pepper.  The Distinguished Service Cross Winner of the Republic of Germany once represented the brotherhood of the musical avant-garde in Bonn's Villa Hammerschmidt and in Lebanon for a German cultural exposition.  During Expo 1970 in Osaka 21 soloists offered his new German sounds in a round auditorium for 5 1/2 hours per day over 183 days, and more than a million fair visitors listened enchanted to this new kind of permanent wave from Germany.

In Amsterdam, as late as 1985, according to a Stuttgart newspaper, "Stockhausen would draw more people than Karajan."  And last year the composer's son and trumpeter Markus even promoted his father in East Germany.

But the more frequently Stockhausen has directed ear into the Universe from his high throne his artistic sense to ideas on salvation, the more persistently he has destroyed his regular position as Germany's #1 composer, which he quite rightly deserved as a revolutionary of the new and as a grandiose craftsman.

To be sure, even in the 3-act Montag aus Licht there are still some trace elements of his sonic inspiration in evidence, especially in the exquisite mixture of voices, synthesizers, and noises, even in the songs without words, which the bassett-horn player Suzanne Stephens and flautist Kathinka Pasveer perform with virtuoso elegance.

But unpleasantly there is nothing else of interest in this score, and it even becomes unsettling to realize: when it gets loud, it sounds like Orff, and when it gets soft, it moans like Cats, and if it keeps going like this, if Sonntag aus Licht is to be expected in the year 2002 as developing this trend, we can expect the world to beam in C major!

This whole musical-theatrical spectacle becomes embarrassing first through its "text-action-stew" (quote from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) with which "total artwork creator" (Gesamtkunstwerker) Stockhausen waters down his musical message, and it makes no difference, as composer and critic Dietmar Polaczek wonders, whether "lower Rhine peasant Buddhism" or "tantric-lamaistic monastic Catholicism" is befogging Stockhausen's sensibilities.

In any case, his community of believers can be seized by the metaphysical smoke from Kürten, and even the Hamburg newspaper Die Zeit ("The Times") gives the prayer wheel a spin: this work LICHT, said the newspaper in all seriousness about the unfinished work, might be a new type of evangelization, a type of Apocalypse of Karlheinz, and between Hitler, Bow-Wow, and a parakeet ("who attempts to whistle the Marseillaise" according to the score) arises "the art of composing as a new sacrament of the new human in a new, transformed Universe."

There, in this new ivory-tower full of thoroughly senseless "Times-liness", the Guru from Bergisch Land "would like to be allowed to make music with planets and moons and roaring groups of planets and suns and moons."

Really, it's almost tragic: while Karlheinz Stockhausen, the searcher for God, treks down the Milky Way of the Cosmos with his retinue, the composer of the same name has been going down backward on the wrong road for a long time."

A few comments on the translated article above from Der Spiegel, a magazine which finds no real equivalent in the U.S.  It resembles Time, but is probably 5 times thicker these days, and obviously therefore carries much more news with "deeper" commentary than Time or Newsweek.

I have always found it interesting that the magazine (c. 1987) deemed Stockhausen worthy of 3 whole pages (plus pictures).

Imagine Time giving 3 pages to e.g. John Adams or Philip Glass to chastise them for becoming egocentric and musically conservative!

The original German is also written in a very high, very ironic style, lurching into sarcasm at times, and complete with double and triple puns, which were difficult to render, but I hope some of them came through.
 

If you are interested in this time capsule, go to page 3 where these and other salient comments can be found.  😇

[CRCulver]

Thanks for drawing my attention to that 1987 article. I'm surprised to see the journalist's suggestion that Stockhausen's popularity lasted somewhat into the 1980s. I thought that things quickly went downhill already from about 1977.

What would have happened to Stockhausen's comparative mega-stardom of the early 1970s if he had not gone mad, is one of the great what-ifs of music history.

[Karl Henning]

You may have seen this live already, or this broadcast, but in any case, here is Freitag, available to view until April 25, 2024.

https://philharmoniedeparis.fr/en/live/1160308

-Bruce

Nice to see that there's news for Stockhausen fans.

[Karl Henning]

I thought it might be time to review some of my earliest articles about Stockhausen, specifically one from 1987 on one of the LICHT operas, when the cycle was still under construction.


If you are interested in this time capsule, go to page 3 where these and other salient comments can be found.  😇

I may have missed this the first time, thanks for re-posting.

[steve ridgway]

You may have seen this live already, or this broadcast, but in any case, here is Freitag, available to view until April 25, 2024.

https://philharmoniedeparis.fr/en/live/1160308

-Bruce

Thanks for that Bruce, I've just spent an hour taking in Act 1. I have no idea what the action on stage is about but found the music quite enjoyable, liked the underlying ambient drone tying it all together.

[Mandryka]

Thanks for drawing my attention to that 1987 article. I'm surprised to see the journalist's suggestion that Stockhausen's popularity lasted somewhat into the 1980s. I thought that things quickly went downhill already from about 1977.

 

Well I remember seeing him  around 1986 or 1987 -- a packed Festival Hall, a vigorous Q and A session with the audience after the opera (Donnerstag)

I think his reputation with pundits and academics may well have declined by then, but he still had a keen following.

[steve ridgway]

The rest of Freitag was fine. I got the idea of initially pure, distinct entities and their essences, dualities, becoming increasingly jumbled in subsequent generations of interbreeding until they reached the point of complete dysfunction. There was nothing harsh, disturbing or dissonant about the music or performance, the timbres were absorbing and clear, the recording quality good and I doubt any of the children taking part were traumatised. All quite dreamy really; I'd recommend it to anyone currently suffering from Stockhausen-phobia.

[Mandryka]

Listening this morning to Samastag.  Tremendous solemn overture and the klavierstuck, Luzifers traum, is always a joy to hear.  But most of all my attention has been grabbed by Katerinas gesang

[Mandryka]

In his 2002 Stockhausen course in Kurten, Richard Toop discussed the Elektronische musik mit tonszenen from Freitag. What is that exactly?  - Oh, just seen the answer on wiki!

How technical are the lectures? Is there enough in it to interest a non technical reader like me? It's quite an expensive purchase, and can't be returned.

https://www.stockhausen-verlag.com/Books_Content_PDF/Richard_Toop_contents_Lectures_2002.pdf

[Cato]

Even better than the Boulez set! (q.v.) 

Dig the HELICOPTERS, Dudes!

[brewski]

Even better than the Boulez set! (q.v.) 

Dig the HELICOPTERS, Dudes!

   

Not sure if the credit has been mentioned elsewhere, but this and all the others are the handiwork of composer Tarik O'Regan. You can see the rest on his Twitter/X account below:

https://twitter.com/tarikoregan

Totally hilarious, and the best use of ChatGPT I have seen to date.

-Bruce

[brewski]

Just uploaded yesterday, the Feb. 14 performance of Stimmung, performed by ekmeles, the expert vocal group directed by Jeff Gavett. Though I haven't yet watched this latest concert, I did see them perform the piece a few years ago, and they were fantastic.

(PS, high marks for sly marketing, i.e., "Stimmung is for lovers." )

-Bruce

[T. D.]

Just uploaded yesterday, the Feb. 14 performance of Stimmung, performed by ekmeles, the expert vocal group directed by Jeff Gavett. Though I haven't yet watched this latest concert, I did see them perform the piece a few years ago, and they were fantastic.

(PS, high marks for sly marketing, i.e., "Stimmung is for lovers." )

-Bruce

[emphasis added]

Funny! While I aurally enjoy Stimmung I find the lyrics, especially the "erotic poetry", so risible that I sold my old CD recording (Singcircle/Hyperion). But whatever floats one's boat...

[brewski]

In June, the Park Avenue Armory in NYC will present Inside Light from Stockhausen's Licht. In 2013 I was in the audience for his OKTOPHONIE, which they staged beautifully in the same space. (The Armory is the size of an airplane hangar.)

Press release with more information here.

-Bruce

[Mandryka]

Enjoyable Sternklang video here

And here's a cool Stimmung