As for the older Pound realising his errors: this important difference between Pound and Stockhausen could largely be attributed to age. Pound was nearly 30 when he began The Cantos and worked on it for over 40 years. Stockhausen was nearly 50 before beginning his 20-odd-year project, so there was less likelihood his ideas would change.

I don't think Pound considered failure when he began the poem: that possibility was forced upon him when he was imprisoned at the end of World War II. Up until that time, he was showing less and less critical distance: the hundred-odd pages each devoted to the succession of Chinese emperors and John Adams' diaries strongly suggest this, to say nothing of the two pro-Mussolini propaganda cantos that followed them.

"Without its creator around, we may find ourselves reinventing what the operas actually mean." – or what 'opera' really should mean. Isn't this really "opera fleuve"? And, in answer to Daniel's problem nr. (2): possibly, the challenge is for us to see a bunch of 'commissionable little unites' as constituting an opera that perhaps is not at all best appreciated as a one-evening thing.

Stockhausen's art has always been encyclopediac. It was always meant to contain all the possibilities. Long notes, short notes. Loud stuff, soft stuff. Technology, spirituality. Schoenberg, traditional music from all over the world.

Calling this encyclopedia that is Licht "an opera" may just be a way to conceptualize all these bits as a whole. So that whatever bit you listen to, you listen to it in the awareness that it's part of a big structure that is in principle there but that will elude you all the time.

Perhaps, in that sense, it's a good thing that the full week never got staged.

I have heard four of the seven operas complete, two in semi-staged ocncert settings, and of the rmaining operas I have heard about a third. The three problems that I sense for the whole are (1) the emphasis on instrumental solos — in the end, one has to deal with the fact that people are lugging odd bits of technology around with them on stage that have nothing directly to do with the dramaturgy, (2) the form — the breakdown into so many commissionable little units and the placement of the main conflict on the second day of the cycle, and (3) the mystical content: either Stockhausen took his Urantia Book cosmology seriously, or it was all a grand marketing scheme, and I just can't get sympathetic to either possibility.

We'll have some significant excerpts from LICHT up at ANABlog shortly.