Stockhausen in Basel and Paris: Donnerstag in a New Light

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...