Karlheinz Stockhausen - Donnerstag aus Licht
Le Balcon - Paris, 2018
Maxime Pascal, Benjamin Lazar, Damien Bigourdan, Safir Behloul, Léa Trommenschlager, Elisa Chauvin, Damien Pass, Henri Deléger, Emmanuelle Grach, Iris Zerdoud, Suzanne Meyer, Mathieu Adam, Jamil Attar
Opéra Comique, Salle Favart - 15 November 2018
Stockhausen still remains a bit of a challenge (I can't imagine it ever being anything else) and his Licht cycle of operas must surely be among some of the most challenging of all. You need to have some belief in the composer's underlying philosophy to play it convincingly or really get anything out of it as a listener. The contemporary music ensemble Le Balcon are certainly believers, familiar with the language of the avant-garde, but usually on a smaller scale and the Licht operas are on another level entirely. Even just one part of it, Donnerstag aus Licht is a huge undertaking.
It's difficult because Stockhausen has very exacting, detailed and specific ideas about how the work should be performed and presented. The Stockhausen Institute also zealously safeguard the composer's legacy and aren't at all happy with anyone who doesn't adhere to its guidelines in word or spirit, as was evident from their rather sternly worded note offering certain misgivings on the last production of Donnerstag at Basel in 2016. Le Balcon's production, directed by Benjamin Lazar and conducted by Maxime Pascal for the Opéra Comique in Paris actually takes more liberties with personal interpretation, but make a much more convincing case that the true message of Donnerstag is not so much in the narrative as in the music.
You can have a synopsis sitting in front of you and even have a working familiarity with the work from the previous Basel production which played out at least to the letter of the work, but Act I of this Paris production is still extraordinarily challenging and difficult to follow. Michael's childhood, mirroring some of the composer's own family experiences, shouldn't be that difficult to follow, even though Stockhausen has three characters playing each of the three main roles; as a singer, a musical instrument and a dancer. Michael for example is represented by a tenor singer, a trumpet player and a dancer.
Having an instrument double or a dance double is now a common enough feature employed at least by some modern directors for other operas - although never both - but Stockhausen has other reasons for such divisions. There's the significant use of the trinity that represents different aspects of a complex personality as well as approaches the subject from different time periods. Lazar however doesn't try to make this any easier to follow (and even switches to a second tenor Michael in Act III), but with a back screen projection of a child writing in Act I there is some indication that Michael may be hugely talented but at this stage is still learning his craft, drawing from personal experience and translating it into words and music. At this stage however, the music is not powerful enough to defeat the forces of father/Luzifer's darkness, and it only develops with the extraterrestrial gift from Mondeva (Moon-Eve).
Act I is a struggle, but by Act II it all starts to make sense as Stockhausen takes his ideas of opera in a new direction and beyond its narrative limitations by having no conventional singing at all. Words are no longer needed, music finds its own expression and universal language as Michael travels around the globe to bring his message to the world. Again, the overarching narrative idea is kept simple - the image of a child spinning a globe instead of literal depictions of situations in Cologne, New York, Japan, Bali, India, Central Africa and Jerusalem - but the real meaning is contained in the music, *IS* the music. In Act II it's Michael's trumpet that defeats Luzifer's trombone much more convincingly in a stunningly staged battle scene.
The visual impact is important also, again more important than the narrative, making use of symbols and lights, symbols written in light - but it's in the music that the work gets it truest musical expression and that this production is most successful. The quality of the musical performance is extraordinary and to make sure that you get it and feel its full impact, it's spread all around the Salle Favart auditorium with electronic sounds, with those strange clicking noises that Stockhausen enumerates and in the huge choral arrangements that come at you from all directions. It's not so much putting the audience in the opera as opening up the music for you to experience it in all its beauty, literally filling your world with music to the extent that you forget that it's "difficult" and find yourself enveloped in a new language that is speaking directly to you.
This evidently is the gift that Stockhausen believes he/Michael has to offer the world and Le Balcon marshall all their forces in collaboration with other like-minded musicians and creatives to make this an orchestral, choral and theatrical tour-de-force. Act III's festival for Michael's homecoming was accordingly utterly astounding, truly making Stockhausen's music speak, sounding like nothing earthly. The impact of the visuals was just as impressive, not needing to be as descriptive as the Basel production was perhaps a little inclined to be, but ensuring instead that the audience's attention was riveted towards the music and towards the musicians, who appropriately are all prominently arranged across the stage for the almost overwhelming final Act.
A rarely performed opera, the Opéra Comique's 2018 production of Donnerstag aus Licht was created for just three performances, so this was always going to be a special event and indeed it proved to be an experience that would be impossible to replicate in any other way. Le Balcon made sure that their production in the just about perfect environment of the Opéra Comique's Salle Favart theatre not only lived up to expectations, but delivered what is likely to be considered as one of the major events of the current opera season. Stockhausen's gift to the world has reached Paris, the truth of its message delivered and it was enthusiastically received.
Links: Opéra Comique
