Fourteen years later, the Birmingham production of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht is still fresh in my mind. I was persuaded by a friend to go to Berlin to see this new production staged by Le Balcon, the French company which has been steadily working its way through the entire Licht cycle with insightful, imaginative productions based on relatively limited resources. The main motivation was to see how they interpreted the theme that underpins Mittwoch: a double image that both celebrates humanity’s ability for aspirational cooperation, while also judging it as inadequate without devotion to the divine forces of the universe, as personified in the opera cycle by Michael, Eva and Lucifer. As other critics had observed, the Birmingham version tended to focus on the optimistic side, with only faint insinuations of the more sinister undercurrents that appear throughout the opera. The performance was held at the Deutsche Oper, which already implied limitations in how the opera would be presented; confined to a proscenium arch with the audience looking on, the staging would not have the immersive qualities envisioned by Stockhausen in his conceived opera for the future. In a way, it appeared Le Balcon were going to press this to their advantage, emphasising that the activities we witnessed were compromised and incomplete.
I’ll start with the helicopters, since that’s what everyone always wants to talk about. They were, of course, not presented live on-site as they were in Birmingham – we were deprived of that spectacle. We were given a replay of the event, staged earlier in the month by four pilots with camera crew and the slightly apprehensive-looking string quartet of the Deutsche Oper taking to the skies in the fields outside Berlin. By way of introduction, we heard Stockhausen speaking before the world premiere some thirty years ago. The sound mix was loud, hot, the strings straining to be heard over the chatter of rotor blades and the roar of the engines; it buffeted the audience with a constant barrage of noise for half an hour. When the score called the musicians to recite numbers, they instinctively bellowed them out above the din, without consideration of aesthetic refinement. The quartet appeared as beaten down as the audience felt, each looking very cramped and claustrophobic in their small cabin; their brows with unrelieved expressions of concentration on the task at hand. It was an atmosphere of highly controlled desperation. Helicopter-String Quartet is often described as an analogy for space travel; at the Deutsche Oper we were reminded that the act itself is a difficult, rigidly disciplined and exhausting chore. Perversely, these reasons made it the best performance of the work I’ve ever experienced.
That feeling of generalised anxiety pervaded the entire opera. What exactly were we witnessing? Birmingham Opera gave the work a carnivalesque staging, complete with additional dance and theatre during the initial Greeting and the concluding Farewell. More detached in Berlin, we observed. Deutsche Oper’s chorus gave a superb rendition of the choral Welt-Parlament, backed by a rather unpleasant video animation of rippling and cascading sand, partly blocked by a large piece of modernist public sculpture. The sculpture and video projections remained throughout, the animations all sharing the same quality of either very out-of-date computer graphics or almost up-to-date artificial intelligence rendering. The unstable, hallucinatory images started to grow on me during the night as their slippery, insubstantial attempts at appearing real became a thematic element with growing importance. Le Balcon’s ensemble performed Orchester-Finalisten under dim lighting, the soloists scattered listlessly about the stage, stirring into action when needed, gaining enthusiasm only when it was their turn to lead. The accompanying collage of sounds that plays through the scene was again mixed very high, blurring the difference between what was played live and what instrumental sounds came from the soundtrack. Human figure and video image became harder to distinguish, the real became illusory. Over each successive solo, a trend towards diminishment and entropy became noticeable. The Helicopter String Quartet followed immediately, without a break.
Le Balcon provided the singers and the musicians for Michaelion, the long, strange scene that concludes the action. The mystery play aspect to Stockhausen’s operas was most obvious here, just as the exact argument he is presenting remained obscure. Heroically committed performances by the soloists and some bizarre pageantry held the audience’s attention while the scene progressed in the unhurried manner of later Stockhausen, but you kept wondering where it was all leading. A low state of anxiety had steadily built up during the night, so that the ambiguously-framed conclusion of the opera became more stinging in its lack of neat resolution. It ends with hopes; hopes that people can follow the principles of Michael and Eva and that Lucifer may work with them, which are high hopes indeed. Cynicism has no place in Stockhausen’s reality but in this production it’s hard to look at the scene’s ending in any other way: whereas hope is typically a positive note on which to end a drama, in this case it arrives as a settlement, unsatisfactory but the only workable alternative. Was it all too negative? Perhaps, acting as a counterpoint, yin to Birmingham’s yang. I doubt if it’s possible for an ideal interpretation of Mittwoch to be imagined, let alone performed. Both stagings I’ve seen had their own, opposing ways of warping your perception.
Leave a Reply