Lucifer and Morality in Stockhausen's Opera Cycle Licht

LUCIFER AND MORALITY IN STOCKHAUSEN’S OPERA CYCLE LICHT THOMAS ULRICH VIL AND ALL ITS MANIFESTATIONS exhibit an enormous attractive power. That a person should be virtuous is a conviction taken for granted in almost all traditions, so there is a touch of the boring about virtue—it seems to be a triviality, even if it is difficult to maintain in everyday life. It is because it ought not to exist, because it is contrary to the prevailing consensus, that makes evil fascinating. There is also the mystery of its origin: how can evil arise and exist, if all the world is agreed that it ought not to be? This issue is even more troublesome for religious thought: If God as the epitome of good is the creator of the cosmos, if He made it from nothingness and repeatedly confirmed that what came into existence is “good” (Gen 1:4, 10, 12, etc.): How then did evil come into the world? Just as God is the epitome and creator of good, and works in E 314 Perspectives of New Music everything that is good, then evil is the devil, Satan, Lucifer, the power from which everything evil emanates. But where does Lucifer come from? How can it be possible that he issues from the good God? Doesn’t Lucifer, by his mere existence, call the goodness of God or his omnipotence into question? Every theology has to deal with these problems, and find out how it stands before an impenetrable mystery here. The incomprehensible is fascinating and draws attention to itself —it has always been that way. Grimmelshausen reports in his Simplicissimus how the hero of the book comes as a “guileless fool” to a pious hermit who teaches him the basics of Christianity: “He began his instruction with the fall of Lucifer”—everything starts from there; only afterward does he begin to talk of the Creation, the Ten Commandments , and so on.1 Karl Barth cautions in his Kirchliche Dogmatik, surely not without reason, against succumbing to this fascination and “look too frequently or lengthily or seriously or systematically” at demons ;2 one could as a result become demonic oneself, and he cites Martin Luther as a cautionary example. Nevertheless, we are not afraid to fix our gaze on Lucifer as one of the incarnations of the demonic. The instigation for this is Karlheinz Stockhausen, in whose operatic heptalogy Licht Lucifer is one of the three main characters. With Lucifer, the most dazzling, colorful, and multifaceted character enters the stage, and this in a work whose exuberant fantasy has little parallel—here again the fascination of evil has its effect. But before we come to speak of him directly, we turn first, at least in passing, to the question of the origin of the Lucifer-figure. The Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) is not much concerned with mythological personages. Yet the key word “Lucifer” is found here— but only in the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the original Hebrew text. In Latin lucifer means “bringer of light.” It refers to Venus or the Morning Star. The Nova Vulgata uses it in this sense in the translation of Isaiah 14:12: “Quomodo cecidisti de Caelo, lucifer, fili Aurorae?” The original text may be rendered in English as: “How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn!”3 The line is part of a satirical song about the downfall of a world ruler (Nebuchadnezzar?). It uses traditional mythological scraps from the milieu of Israel, which told of a warrior named Helel, Shachar’s son, who, inspired and driven by hubris, wanted to conquer the mountain of the gods but, in his blasphemous flight into the sky crashed into the realm of the dead; the memory of the ancient Greek myth of Phaeton, the son of the sun god Helios, is close to this.4 Whatever the truth of the matter may have been, it is typical and important that this mythological material no longer has any intrinsic meaning here, but only invokes a world of Lucifer and Morality in Stockhausen's Opera Cycle Licht 315 images that illustrates historical events. For the prophet it has nothing to...