A friend of mine once attended the summer school Stockhausen hosted at Kürten each year. When he told me about it, we joked back and forth about the ridiculousness of it all, the cult atmosphere, the white outfits, the harem, the cosmic consciousness, the megalomania. I asked him what the course was like and he suddenly got serious. “It changed my life.” He then stressed that he didn’t mean just music, he meant life itself.
Having experienced four of Stockhausen’s Licht operas now, I can fully understand my friend’s attitude. The premise is hopelessly overambitious, the substance absurd to the point of offensiveness, the execution demands the preposterous. And each time, the audience (sometimes with the performers) ends up milling around outside the venue afterwards in a state of euphoria.
After getting enthused about the Le Balcon’s staging of Donnerstag aus Licht at Southbank, I looked them up to see when they planned the next instalment of their proposed complete cycle in Paris, only to find out it was happening this summer. It was a short but unforgettable holiday. Le Balcon has been taking a relatively practical approach to staging these spectacles, so I was worried that the relatively stripped-back approach would take the edge off Samstag, which places a heavier reliance on theatrical presentation over libretto to tell its story.
No fear of that. Each scene depicts a single, bold image, detailed in music and gesture more than words. It is almost childishly simple. Of the three Licht protagonists, Samstag takes Lucifer as its subject, and your immediate hopes that this will make the opera suitably badass are pretty much fully rewarded. From the first scene where Lucifer stalks onto the stage, bangs out an ominous chord on a piano and summons his musician, this production captured the right mix of hermetic esoterica and giddy coups de théâtre. (Bass Damien Pass pulled off the portayal of Lucifer as self-possessed arrogance covering a deep-set core of anxiety.) Over the following scenes, the piano was pressed into service as a podium and then, end on, as a protruding tongue from a grimacing, demonic face. The use of projections was highly effective, illuminating the music and its underlying symbolic conceits without cluttering things up.
That theme of transformation was strongly present again. In Donnerstag, it is largely confined to the stage but from Samstag onwards Stockhausen turned his attention to transforming the audience. Le Balcon ran the first three scenes together into an unbroken span of three hours. Even on that supremely hot weekend, the punters stayed focused and enthusiastic throughout. (Props to the elderly lady who strolled away afterwards, bedecked with explosive debris from the first scene as a trophy.) The final scene of Lucifer’s exorcism and farewell took place in, and in front of, a nearby church. At six PM we were all calmly taking our seats in a concert hall; by eleven we were in a mob on the street rapturously cheering while passersby were inadvertently sprayed with debris by coconut-hurling monks chanting St Francis’ Salutatio Virtutum. “What’s going on?” one tourist asked me. We’ve exorcised Lucifer, have some coconut.
