From Wagner's Ring to Moses und Aron and Stockhausen

I was asked by Brian Wise of WQXR to contribute to a series in which the station took pieces from its Classical Countdown, its year-end listener survey, and gave recommendations for 'next step' pieces. I took on Wagner's Ring - surprisingly enough! - here, with excerpts. A slightly longer version of what I wrote, which had to be cut for reasons of space, is reproduced below:

Wagner’s Ring, a tetralogy – strictly speaking, three ‘days’ and a ‘preliminary evening’ – containing, as he wrote to Liszt, ‘the beginning of the world and its destruction!’ remains perhaps the greatest challenge, and the greatest reward, for our opera houses to stage.  It may not be perfect; if any work by Wagner merits that epithet, it would surely be Tristan und Isolde. But its monumentality sums up the aspirations and the conflicts of the nineteenth century as no other artwork can. The need for a new theatre – and a new, post-revolutionary audience – is not the least of its demands, and the Bayreuth Festival has, over its history, set new standards and, latterly, theatrical challenges to an operatic world always prone to treat musical drama as a collection of museum pieces. No serious composer of opera, and indeed few serious composers of any description, was unaffected by Wagner’s legacy, even if some, such as Ferruccio Busoni, came to regard him as the end of a line rather than a new dawn; Stravinsky’s anti-Wagnerism was just as much a consequence as Schoenberg’s devotion.

Schoenberg’s own unfinished operatic masterpiece, Moses und Aron has as strong a claim as any to follow in Wagner’s footsteps. It even employs compositional technique directly descended from Wagner’s own motivic writing, albeit with more than a little Brahms mixed in. Moses, as befits Schoenberg’s post-Wagnerian vision of the composer as prophet, challenges the audience, the performers, and indeed the very conventions of what might actually be represented on stage. It asks difficult questions about the easy idolatry of art and mass communication, symbolised by the contrast between Moses, who may be right but whom his people cannot understand, and his brother, Aron, whose twelve-note bel canto leads them astray. The Orgy around the Golden Calf is a musical riot to rival that of The Rite of Spring; it has even been described, in knowing reference to one of Wagner’s greatest bêtes noires, as ‘twelve-note Meyerbeer’. And yet, when it subsides, Moses having descended from Mount Sinai, the message seems bleak: Moses lacks the ability to communicate. Does modernist opera too?  Growing acceptance, even idolatrous following, of Schoenberg’s work answers with a resounding ‘no’.

The same answer echoes perhaps more resoundingly still with an heroic 2012 opera production in Birmingham: the first complete performance of Stockhausen’s MITTWOCH (Wednesday) from his vast LICHT cycle. That series of seven operas stretched still further the bounds of the operatic – and with unabashedly neo-Wagnerian ambition. Each of the seven works treats with one of the days of Creation, though not as mere earthlings might know it. (Stockhausen came to believe that he was of extra-terrestrial provenance.) Lasting twice as long as the Ring, Licht’s equivalent to Wagner’s Nibelungenlied was the mysterious Urantia Book. Some find it difficult to take the composer’s cosmogony seriously. However, the imagination that brought extraordinary scenes such as ‘World-Parliament’, in which delegates from across the universe debate in invented languages the meaning of love, and the celebrated ‘Helicopter String Quartet’, the theatricality of the players’ four helicopters perhaps obscuring the typically tight-knit musical ‘superformula’ organisation, let alone the appearance of Lucicamel, the dromedary ‘emanation’ of Lucifer elected as focus of cosmological solidarity…: that is an imagination that demands our attention. Like most performances of the Ring, the premiere performances of MITTWOCH  sold out immediately, some Stockhausen disciples travelling across the world to attend, in homage, conscious or otherwise, to the first, 1876 Bayreuth Festival, to attend all four. 

At any rate, I was delighted to be able to get some Schoenberg on air!

Bayreuth, Parsifal, and the Artwork of the Future

(I was delighted to be invited to speak in late November at the Internationaal Wagner Congres Amsterdam 2013. Below is the text of my paper. A considerably longer, fully-referenced version will be published as an essay in a 2014 issue of the German journal, wagnerspectrum. However, it will not have the pretty pictures...)

 

In the beginning was Bayreuth. Except, of course, for Wagner, it was not the beginning: it was the end, at least an end, and in many respects a misleading one. Bayreuth, or perhaps better, the idea and ideal which have come down to us, mostly from the period following Wagner’s death, presents a gathered congregation as opposed to the freer assembly apparently envisaged by the younger Wagner. That leads us to ask: can one, should one, do more than smile at the utopian idea of a wooden theatre to be torn down at the same time as the score of Siegfried went up in flames, after but three performances – ‘Entrée: gratis!’ – given within the course of a week? Was the ‘artwork of the future’, outward looking, ‘universal’ as opposed to merely ‘national’, just as much a progressive pipe-dream, then, as the ‘springtime of peoples’ of the 1848-9 revolutions? As AJP Taylor’s ‘turning point’ whose ‘fateful essence’ was that Germany ‘failed to turn,’ or, still worse, Sir Lewis Namier’s sneering epitaph, the ‘revolution of the intellectuals’? Wagner’s part in the Dresden uprising is well known. It is nevertheless worth reiterating that, whatever the disillusionment of the 1850s and beyond, revolutionary hopes found themselves instantiated both in the subsequent course of much of European politics – liberals and sometimes even socialists found that they could accomplish a great deal by cooperation with a reinstated old order, whose reaction was in any case more military than aristocratic – and in Wagner’s later musico-dramatic deeds. The ‘artwork of the future’ remained, endured, even strengthened itself, for all the transformations, both pragmatic and principled, required by what we might call, in dubious homage to the former people’s democracies, the ‘actually existing Bayreuth Festival’.

 

Anniversary years naturally prompt us to look back, to take stock, yet also to look to the present and indeed to the future. After all, we find ourselves celebrating and considering ‘Wagner in 2013’ as much as we do ‘Wagner in 1813’. I shall consider Wagner principally through the lens of performance, through a lens focused upon a Bayreuth that looks forward and back. It is to one particular production that I shall specifically turn, to Stefan Herheim’s well-nigh ‘classic’ 2008-12 staging of the Bayreuth work par excellence, Parsifal, a production that explicitly engages with the work’s reception history, in order to turn in informed fashion to the twenty-first-century present and future of Wagner’s artwork. But before that, and with Herheim’s staging in mind, a broader consideration of the relationship between staging of a work from the operatic or at least musico-dramatic ‘museum’, and the historical process, may be in order.

 

Herheim opens with Parsifal at the time of its first, Bayreuth staging, in 1882. He proceeds to tell a history that leads to somewhere approaching the present day, even turning a mirror upon the audience at one point, a moment with considerably greater theatrical power than a mere retelling might suggest. The audience is not simply accused, deservedly or otherwise; it is also reminded that it belongs to a drama that remains unfinished, whatever Wagner’s Hegelian aspirations towards totality, and that it, the audience, interprets, shapes, even writes the history suggested. Far from having reached a Fukuyama-like ‘end of history’, we might all have become historians: a challenge already to the ‘gathered congregation’ of Bayreuth orthodoxy, whether that be Wagner’s own or not. Wagner, though he might sometimes come close to positing a false immediacy of audience response, was no proponent of art as non-reflective, non-reflexive entertainment – purveyor of the diversions opponents of interpretative stage direction more often than not wish to see enacted. ‘Our theatrical public,’ he complained in Oper und Drama, ‘has no need for the artwork; it desires diversion from the stage, … well-crafted details, rather than the necessity of artistic unity.’

 

Herheim, it should be added, began his career as a cellist, and is a more unusual example than one might expect, or at least desire, of a director who reads the score. (We should be surprised if a director of Æschylus in the original did not read Greek, yet treat non-musical directors of Wagner with equanimity.) The issue of staging the Prelude to the first act was resolved more amicably, more fruitfully, than it would be with Barenboim in Lohengrin. Initially, the conductor, Daniele Gatti was sceptical, concerned that the audience might be distracted from the music. But Herheim made the excellent point in an interview that would suggest that, once, the curtain rose, the audience need no longer concern itself with the music, continuing, ‘I'm not saying that in principle the Prelude should always be staged. But if you have good reasons to portray the music in the prelude, it's just the way that it’s done that you can argue against. Gatti acknowledged this and was excited about the symbiosis the staging entered into with the music.’ That, in a sense, is a perfect restatement of the echt-Wagnerian dialectic of music drama; the various elements – if indeed they may be considered separate elements at all, Wagner having taken great pains to stress, in Hegelian fashion, their initial unity in the ancient world – gain in intensity by mutual interaction. Greater emphasis upon the staging heightens rather than lessens the effect of the orchestra, and so forth.

 

Crucially, that symbiosis enabled, even provoked, the emergence of an idea of the score as redeemer. It was subtle rather than thrust in one’s face, unlike the provocative second-act Nazi imagery, which I shall address later. Yet, for that reason, and it might well take more than one encounter fully to appreciate this, Herheim’s candidate for an answer to Wagner’s riddle of ‘Erlösung dem Erlöser’ emerged all the more convincingly. Again, that was a possibility rather than a definitive ‘solution’, but successful dramas, like successful performances, do not trade in the latter. The tale of German history, of Parsifal as a work developing through that history, could thereby be seen and heard as requiring and receiving some form of transcendental, or at least beneficial, intervention, not so much ‘grace’, but something more immanent, arising from within, the attempted negation of the litany of negative dialectics to which history and work have been subjected. There was no false mediated unity in which to rejoice or rather to wallow.

For the conservative caricature of modern Regietheater, which in certain cases has an element of truth to it, a caricature in which, for the sake of argument, Monsalvat is arbitrarily relocated to a multi-storey car-park in Essen, and references to the automobile industry become determining features, bears no relation to the exploration of music, words, reception, and so much more offered by Herheim and other probing directors. Still less does it respond to Wagner’s strenuous challenge. Interestingly, Peter Konwitschny has, for very similar reasons, avowedly dissociated himself from the Regietheater label, it perhaps being no coincidence that Konwitschny, the son of a celebrated conductor, Felix, is himself a musician: 

I do not consider myself a representative of the Regietheater. Often, these directors present one single idea, such as for example staging Rigoletto in an empty swimming pool or in a slaughterhouse. These ideas are not consequentially followed through and explored, and in most cases, the singers stand next to each other on stage just as unconnected as in conventional productions.

My stagings, on the other hand, aim to return to the roots: to get to the core of the pieces, through the jungle of interpretative traditions, which, in most cases, have distorted the pieces. The accusation that this is ‘too intellectual for the average viewer’ is absurd and exposes the enemies of such theatre as opposing new insights.

Indeed, the pernicious anti-intellectualism of such attacks as such, as opposed to perfectly justified criticisms of particular productions, reveals itself to be a strange sort of intellectual condescension. No one reading Hegel or listening to Wagner for the first time expects to ‘understand’ everything; nor does he mind when he ‘fails’ to do so. Were there a final, achievable, destination, we should then give up, having ‘mastered’ Parsifal or the Phänomenologie des Geistes, and then move on to something else. Re-enactment of the sort envisaged by the decriers of interpretation makes no more sense here than it does in performance. Ritual is in Parsifal and through Parsifal dynamically, dialectically challenged from within as well as from without; that indeed is the very stuff of Wagner’s drama.

 

For Parsifal was intended to be and remains different. Wagner’s various attempts to avoid the pejorative – to him – ‘opera’ as a description of his later works may nowadays elicit as much scepticism as blind adoration, though in simply calling Tristan und Isolde ‘drama’ (Handlung), he certainly captured a quality of that singular work. However, it would take a Wagnerian of extreme, unhealthy devotion not to raise at least a hint of a smile at the cumbersome Bühnenweihfestspiel, or ‘stage-festival-consecration-play’, employed for Parsifal. And what that term might mean has brought all manner of consequences for the work’s reception, even indeed, given the determination of Cosima and other Bayreuth loyalists that it should remain confined to the stage it allegedly consecrated, for the possibility of staging it at all. The surrounding aura of sanctity may seem to many repellent (‘an unseemly and sacrilegious conception of art as religion and the theatre as a temple’ – Stravinsky), ridiculous (Debussy, albeit continuing to honour the score alone as ‘one of the loveliest monuments ever raised to the serene glory of music’), or both, as in Nietzsche’s case. Moreover, the claim that Parsifal is in any straightforward sense a ‘Christian work’, as opposed to a work that treats with, amongst other things, Christianity, would find few takers today. Even if the end of the first act were an invitation to receive Holy Communion, the Grail Knights’ words – ‘Partake of the bread, valiantly transform it into corporeal strength and power’ – suggest a church or theology whose heterodoxy extended beyond the merely gnostic.

 

That said, this tale of a ‘pure fool’, so ignorant that he knows neither whence he has come, nor even his name, who, through the offices of divine grace rather than by his own deeds, enlightened through compassion (Schopenhauer’s Mitleid, ‘suffering with’), rejuvenates a dying community, remains quite different from the operatic essays of any of Wagner’s contemporaries and many of his successors. Parsifal resists assimilation to the opera house; it is out of place amongst champagne, canapés, and diva-worshippers. Wagner wrote to Ludwig II that he wished to protect it from ‘a common operatic career’. Pierre Boulez, a highly distinguished interpreter and critic as well as compositional successor, understood this very well when he approvingly wrote of Wagner loathing a system in which ‘opera houses are … like cafés where … you can hear waiters calling out their orders: ‘One Carmen! And one Walküre! And one Rigoletto!’ Wagner’s works declare their incompatibility with existing theatrical conventions and norms – even today, arguably still more so. And of those works, Parsifal remains the ne plus ultra.

 

The signal strength of Herheim’s production is that it engages with these problems: with the fraught associations, both with Bayreuth – which, for better and for worse, is also quite different from anywhere else – and with broader historical themes, associations the work has gathered from at least the time of its premiere in 1882. So intensely dialectical and multi-layered is Herheim’s direction that we tread successfully a tightrope between presentation of his guiding Konzept – the history of Parsifal as a work and the world in which it has developed from the time of its first performance to that of its most recent – and recounting of the immanent story of Parsifal. Two stories run not so much in parallel as with mutual influence, yet without inflicting harm upon each other and with no sense of contrivance.

 

In the first act, we therefore witness the early days of post-Wagner Wahnfried, the sickly, incestuous goings-on of an impeccably haut bourgeois family and its nursery (Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks comes to mind), in the era of an oft-present Imperial Eagle. As Christianity enters an especially peculiar phase, dreams and childhood come to the fore, likewise the psychopathology of religious experience (which both Nietzsche and Mann saw as fundamental to the work). A priest, incense – Nietzsche’s accusation of Wagner sinking to his knees before the Cross re-examined – and, most shockingly, circumcision of the infant who may or may not ‘be’ a young Parsifal, offer almost as much food for thought as Wagner’s own inversion, echoing the philosophy of Feuerbach, of the elements. The violence of the deed could hardly have been more topical during the 2012 legal controversy over infant genital mutilation in Germany; and yet, it also points to something older, deep-seated, and of course very much part of the work’s reception history: the question of whether anti-Semitism might be expressed in Wagner’s drama. (It notably does not propose answers.) Amfortas now seems far more central to the drama. His cry of pain jolts us from complacent ‘knowledge’ of the work, and also points forward – or backward! – to Kundry’s scream of laughter at Christ, who, whatever Wagner may have hoped, must also have undergone the procedure, on the road to Calvary.

 

The second act opens in a field hospital. For once, and this is typical of Herheim’s attention to Wagner’s detail, we actually see the renegade Knights, Sir Ferris and all. Klingsor is Cabaret Master of Ceremonies; for now, we behold Weimar Germany, our Moorish castle’s owner suggestive in white tie and fishnets. The delicious representation of the Flowermaidens as orderlies and flappers – is that not just what they are? – gains dramatic attention, as well as firmly placing us in the inter-war period. (I say, ‘firmly’, but historical time passes as its performative cousin does.) And yet, a reminder that various levels of interpretation are anything but distinct is offered by a greater keenness of manipulation when it comes to Kundry’s acts: above all, what she tells Parsifal. She is in turn being manipulated by Klingsor; yet perhaps so many of us are understandably now influenced by feminist readings that we feel uncomplicatedly sympathetic. It is salutary to be reminded that this Rose of Hell – the rose very much part of Herheim’s imagery, ‘new’ video technology included – has, despite her plight, agency of her own. That is more properly feminist than to consider her purely as victim. And the similarity of costume between her and Klingsor, both in Weimar cross-dressing travesty, reinforces the need both have for each other, an Hegelian master-slave dialectic re-imagined. Wagner’s artwork is permitting of answers, or better, further questions, which he may or may not have been able to conceive himself. Historical understanding enables it to become of the present, even of the future.

 

The final scene of the second act is electric, the coming of Bayreuth’s and Germany’s darkest years truly shocking. Indeed, the phrase coup de théâtre might have been invented for this advent of the Third Reich, signalled by the ‘Weimar’ castle’s destruction, the arrival of stormtroopers and a brown-shirted, tomorrow-belonging-to-him, little boy, and the unfurling of swastikas. Overdue yet nevertheless courageous, the Festival seemed at last ready to begin to come to terms with its history. Judging by the disgruntled noises from some members of the audience – it should hardly surprise that ‘conservative’ critics of searching productions would feel discomfited by a reminder of their ideological kinship – it remains an absolute necessity too.

 

Then, the final act opens in the garden of a bombed Wahnfried. Parsifal’s coming and Good Friday offer the possibility – illusory? – of rejuvenation. In a tribute to the Bayreuth Tannhäuser of Götz Friedrich, with whom Herheim studied, a procession of the starved post-war population crosses the stage, victims of what has gone before and, prospectively at least, of the mendacious ideology of the Wirtschaftswunder and its culture industry. The point of ultimate hope comes when a star briefly appears in the sky: wonderfully touching, yet what does it signify? A (false) messiah’s advent? A simple, childlike pleasure? It certainly rings truer than the gaudy coloured lights signalling Parsifal’s descent into the realm of the (lifestyle?) guru. Another brave coup de théâtre – Herheim never forgets that Parsifal, amongst other things, is theatre; nor should we – comes with a projection during the Verwandlungsmusik. A request is displayed from the young Wagner brothers, Wieland and Wolfgang, at the 1951 (re-)opening of ‘New Bayreuth’, that political discussion be banished from the Green Hill. An image of Wagner is bricked up behind Parsifal’s childhood wall, the composer remaining too hot to handle. Might we also recall that Wahnfried wall built by Wolfgang, on whose other side Winifred remained until her death, a standing, tenacious reminder that politics could not so easily be banished?

 

If anything, politics stand still more starkly at the heart of the final scene. Amfortas’s trial – in every sense – takes us from post-war Nuremberg to the present-day Bundestag. The problematical nature of charismatic leadership is here for all to see. Parsifal is not one of the trio seen at the close, presumably hastening us to an uncertain future; instead, we find ourselves in the hands of Gurnemanz, Kundry – she does not expire – and a young boy. Or is he Parsifal, and has the whole drama been a dream or, rather, the ultimate nightmare? Friedrich Meinecke’s ‘German catastrophe’, the purported Sonderweg of German history? There is certainly no solace to be had from the bickering politicians of the Bundestag, the flag of the Federal Republic draping Titurel’s coffin, yet Parsifal seems to have offered at best a dead-end, a touch of snake oil: a modern politician? Amfortas, like Siegfried, seems to have gained in dignity through death. Nihilism, as Nietzsche would doubtless have had it? Or Wagner’s lifelong anarchism? Again, questions are dramatically suggested rather than dogmatically answered.

 

What of Herheim’s aforementioned turning the mirror upon the audience?  It comes across as an invitation, indeed an incitement, to question everything we have thought. ‘Educating Parsifal’, the character, is also ‘educating Parsifal’, the work, is also ‘educating us’ – not in merely didactic but dramatic fashion. As Horace put it many years earlier, ‘Change but the name, and the tale is told of you’. It is perhaps only what Wagner had been doing all along, although, in the emotional context both Wagner and Herheim have developed, as opposed to the abstraction of a mere act of reporting, it would be an unimaginative soul indeed who did not relish the mirror’s ambiguous invitation. For, in the words of Carl Dahlhaus, ‘It is precisely in order to radicalise conflicts – so that “resolutions” are ruled out – that dramas are written; if not, they would be treatises.’ It is for precisely that reason that we perform rather than re-enact, that we study as well as perform, that we think rather than wallow, that history enlivens rather than deadens, that the artwork is of past, present, and future. Indeed, it is also for those reasons that music, as Daniel Barenboim has pointed out in his work with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, has the potential, the extraordinary power, if not to resolve political conflicts, then to bring people together, to have them work together – and that includes the audience. The communal, religious, and political role of Attic tragedy Wagner wished to recreate is just as relevant, to a revolutionary artwork of our future as to one of his.

 

I have suggested, then, some ways in which Wagner, viewed in performative terms, might use the past, often highly controversial, to look to the future. The idea of an ‘artwork of the future’ remains in many respects as burningly relevant as it did during the years of Wagner’s Zurich exile. An artwork that engages critically with the concerns of humanity and yet strenuously declares the (transcendental?) value of art as extending beyond mere pamphleteering, and which in form and content dramatises, problematises that tension is not simply saying something about art and its reception. As Ludwig Hevesi’s words, inscribed upon the Vienna Secession Building, have it, ‘To every age its art, to art its freedom’. That need not, indeed cannot, be accomplished by all-too-easy evasion, by distancing oneself from the musical works. Herheim’s dramaturgy, as discussed, enabled the music – not in a now discredited sense of ‘absolute music’, with the reactionary, neo-Romantic connotations that has acquired, but in a critical sense more suited to our time, which will doubtless thereafter be subject to criticism – to emerge as its own redeemer, the immanent theology of Parsifal thereby renewing and reinvigorating itself

 

Bayreuth and Wagner’s artwork of the future might yet, then, prove further beginnings, in a sense that both honours, in Meistersinger-fashion, the claims of art as time-honoured tradition and, as Wagner always insisted, reaches beyond the restricting limits of art merely for its own sake. Moreover, a Franconian festival theatre and its surroundings might prove just the place, out of season, for the first intégrale of Stockhausen’s neo-Wagnerian Licht cycle, indeed for a host of new works. Without falling prey to the ‘operatic’ danger we saw Boulez sketch above, custodians of the Wagnerian repertory would have nothing to fear – and everything to gain.

Mittwoch, Birmingham Opera Company, 25 August 2012

 

Greeted by a camel at the Argyle Works

Argyle Works, Birmingham

 

Kathinka Pasveer (sound projection: Wednesday Greeting, World Parliament, Michaelion, music direction)

Igor Kavulek (sound engineer)
BALANCE Audio-Media, Cologne (sound equipment)
Graham Vick (director)
Paul Brown (designs)
Giuseppe di Iorio (lighting)
Ron Howell (choreography)       
Sheelagh Barnard (technical director)
Richard Willacy (executive producer)

 

 

World Parliament

 

Representatives – Ex Cathedra (chorus master: Jeffery Skidmore)

President – Ben Thapa
Substitute President – Elizabeth Drury

Orchestra Finalists

Dan Bates (oboe), Jonathan Rees (cello), Vicky Wright (clarinet), Amy Harman (bassoon), Debs White (violin), Ian Foster (tuba), Karin de Fleyt (flute), Andrew Connington (trombone), Bridget Carey (viola), Bruce Nockles (trumpet), Jeremy Watt (double bass), Mark Smith (French horn), David Waring (percussion)

Helicopter String Quartet

Elysian Quartet (Emma Smith, Jennymay Logan (violins), Vincent Sipprell (viola), Laura Moody (cello)

Moderator – DJ Nihal
Ian Dearden (sound projection)
Miles Fletcher, Will Samuelson, Alistair Badman, Nigel Burton, Chris Holland, Peter Driver (pilots)

Michaelion

Delegates – London Voices (chorus director: Ben Parry)

Operator – Michael Leibendgut
Chloé l’Abbé (flute), Fie Schouten (basset horn), Marco Blauuw (trumpet), Stephen Menotti (trombone), Antonio Pérez Abelián (synthesiser)
Lucicamel – Marie-Louise Crawley, Nathan Lafayette

 

A 'cup of yellow'

The first performances of Stockhausen’s Mittwoch – the world premiere took place on Mittwoch 22 August, the composer’s birthday, whilst I attended the last of four performances on Samstag – could hardly have failed to be an ‘event’ of the highest order: the last of the Licht cycle, in duration roughly twice the length of Wagner’s Ring, to receive its first full performance, though it was the sixth of the seven days to be composed. These performances were, if possible, rendered all the more extraordinary by being given not by an established opera house and company, but by the heroic Birmingham Opera Company, founded by director, Graham Vick, as a community project, run from an office comprised of just three full-time workers in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. Productions are site-specific: ‘We don't have an opera house and we don't work in conventional theatres. We conjure our theatres out of spaces used for other purposes or maybe just abandoned. A brief period of illumination and then we move on – not tied to bricks and mortar.’  But then Stockhausen was hardly a conventional composer, let alone a conventional opera composer. The Argyle Works, a disused chemical factory, proved an excellent setting, not only in terms of its large, adaptable spaces, but also on account of a fine acoustic, doubtless testament to a great deal of expert preparation by sound engineers.

Despite its use of a 'super-formula', Mittwoch is not easy - certainly far less so than, say, Donnerstag, to consider as a unified work, especially in terms of narrative. Perhaps it would be more so as part of a complete cycle, perhaps not. But musically, the opening Greeting and Farewell, sound projection by the tireless Kathinka Pasveer, provide electronic material employed, if not throughout, then in two of the four intervening scenes, 'Orchestra Finalists' and 'Michaelion'. In a sense, it is up to the individual whether he should construct his own Mittwoch narrative, but in a sense, that is always the case: the situation, as so often with Stockhausen, is simply more extreme here. Mittwoch was first intended to be the only opera in which the cycle's three principal protagonists, for want of a better word than 'characters', (Eve, Lucifer, Michael) cooperate.As it happened, none of them actuallyt appears in straightforward fashion, though Eve and Lucifer are represented by 'emanations' (the latter in the bizarre form of 'Lucicamel' (German, Luzicamel), yes, a pantomime caamel), and the name of Michael is frequently invoked in apparent awe. Yet the idea of 'cooperation', related to the idea of 'love', remains: as Richarp Toop points out, 'almost uniquely in Stockhausen's work, this collaboration is political, in a parliamentary sense, in the inner ones, it is more specifically musical'. Even when it is political, it seems a hundred light-years, or whatever measurement Stockhausen would employ, from the political commitment of contemporaries such as Henze or Nono, let alone the younger Lachenmann. Stockhausen's (quasi?-)theological cosmogony remains the thing, for better and/or worse.

 

With ‘Wednesday Greeting’ (‘Mittwochs-Gruss), which originates from the electronic music of ‘Michaelion’ rather than the other way round, we were plunged into darkness, at least visually, whilst a four-track (quadraphonic) performance of music ‘very seldom reminiscent of this world and which awakens the universe of the fantasy’ (Stockhausen) unfolded. ‘Listening to music in the dark will become much more important in the future than it is today,’ Stockhausen wrote  in Electronic Art Music (2006), going on to say, ‘The main function of art music will be to make the souls of the listeners fly freely through the universes, with infinite new surprises.’ Whatever one thinks of that, the darkness certainly made one concentrate, and brought into relief choreographed moments – in a scenic rather than musical sense – that appeared all around us, just like the sounding of the music. Aspects of creation myths, old and new, flashed before our eyes, all superbly executed by a fine team of dancers. It is difficult not to respond favourably to the intense seriousness of Stockhausen’s vision, if, at the same time, it is difficult – at least for this viewer and listener – not to find an unintentional absurdity to it too. ‘Yellow is the colour’, apparently, so we left the first hall to progress to the ‘World Parliament’, passing an artist apparently pleasurably writhing in yellow paint that he poured over himself, perhaps the closest we came to conventional eroticism.

 

‘World Parliament’ (‘Welt-Parlament’) proved, apart from anything else, quite beautiful in an almost conventional a cappella choral sense. Praise could not be too high for the representatives, members of Ex Cathedra, conducted by the President, Ben Thapa. Love is the subject for debate, its meaning discussed in a manner that perhaps came easier to a child of the sixties than to many of us today. But even if sentiments, sometimes in invented tongues, sometimes in the vernacular, such as ‘Love resounds in your voice. Listen to your tone, to the sound of your voice, to GOD, because love must be in it,’ might be a little difficult to take for us, however beautifully sung by tenors joining forces, let alone the President’s ‘Positive thinking – that’s it!’, the ritual, choral and visual, was entrancing. Perched high on yellow stools, representatives with different world flags emblazoned upon their faces – I saw them in make-up when entering the factory – interacted, debated, apparently learned from each other. The substitute President, an ‘Eve emanation’, her coloratura wonderfully despatched by soprano Elizabeth Drury, takes office after a janitor called out the President on account of his car being towed away. Stockhausen admitted that he ‘very consciously made it that banal.’ Quite: perhaps it is a matter of that ‘German humour’ even we Teutonophiles find baffling in the extreme. However, it was the beauties of Stockhausen’s choral writing, apparently not entirely removed from some of his earliest works, that offered greater sustenance.

 

‘Orchestra Finalists’ (‘Orchester-Finalisten’) had us turn to the often staggering instrumental prowess of a fine group of musicians named above, octophonic electronic music following the progress of the instrumentalists. Again, Pavseer’s expertise here was crucial to the scene’s success. Suspended from the ceiling, splashing in a paddling pool, shouting, even, according to Stockhausen, ‘moving in an individual way and projecting their personal aura’, this extends ‘the way musicians publicly perform during music competitions’. You can say that again. In addition to the musicians’ antics, there was much else to divert the eye: dance, processional, including men in top hats with billowing smoke, a man with an aeroplane on his head...

 

The ‘Helicopter String Quartet’, premiered by the Ardittis but here performed by the Elysian Quartet, has become so notorious that it is difficult to know what to say about it. It is probably best to understand it as further evidence of Stockhausen’s extraordinary imagination, somehow both naïve and incredibly complex. As theatre it is quite a thing – and one should remember that Mittwoch is theatre, not ‘absolute’ music, whatever that might mean. Reports I had read were highly critical of Radio 1 DJ Nihal as Moderator. Perhaps anyone who was not Stockhausen himself would have come in for considerable criticism here. Yet the role is prescribed in the work and our Moderator offered at least one sound piece of advice, to try to listen to the music, that is, not simply to be wowed by the effect, relayed to us via four screens. That is difficult to do, but especially towards the end, I found myself increasingly able to listen to the notes, to hear the passing of notes, even lines, as well as the shouted numbers of the Lucifer formula, between the players, as well as hearing the interaction of instruments and helicopters. In the post-quartet discussion, the pilots acquitted themselves very well indeed, one of them (Nigel Burton, I think) revealing a gift for dry wit.

 

The final scene, 'Michaelion', perhaps brings us closer to something more operatic as generally understood, though we remain distant indeed from The Marriage of Figaro. Indeed, at times we seem closer to the world of Dr Who. The name 'Michaelion' makes reference to Constantine's fourth-century temple at Chalcedon in honour of the archangel Michael, but the 'World Parliament' has now turned intergalactic, with absurdity whose humour may or may not be intentional. Cosmological solidarity is summarised by the uniquely cooperative role played by Lucifer's 'emanation', Lucicamel, though passages such as the 'Shoe-Shine Serenade', the appearance of a huge bottle of champagne, and of course Lucicamel's defecation of seven planet-globes, paralleling the seven days of the week, tend to linger longer in the memory. Luca, who arises out of the camel, is appointed Operator, and responds to delegates' concerns in a short-wave form that harks back to 1960s works such as Kurzwellen. Once again, the choral singing, this time from London Voices, was beyond reproach, similarly Pasveer's sound projection and the expert instrumental playing, including a 'Bassetsu-Trio' for basset horn, trumpet, and trombone, symbolising Eve, Michael, and Lucifer, perhaps echoing in its way the eighteenth-century, Mozartian serenade 'entertainement', albeit this time for delegates. Emerging from this strange yet compelling tableau-cum-drama, we were offered a 'cup of yellow' to the strains of the electronic 'Wednesday Farewell' ('Mittwochs'Abschied').

 

 

 

 

An extraordinary experience, by any standards, for which all concerned, from Vick to the musicians and other artists, to the Arts Council, deserves a huge round of whatever passes for applause on Sirius. Now we need someone to stage Licht in its entirety.

 

Stockhausen, RNCM Wind Orchestra/Rundell, et al., 9 November 2008

Royal Festival Hall

Stockhausen – Gesang der Jünglinge
Stockhausen – Lucifers Tanz (SAMSTAG from LICHT, London premiere)
Stockhausen – Michaels-Abschied (DONNERSTAG from LICHT)

Marco Blaauw (trumpet)
Karin de Fleyt (piccolo)
Nicholas Isherwood (bass)
Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra
Clark Rundell (conductor)

With this concert, the Southbank Centre’s KLANG festival, curated by Oliver Knussen, drew to a close. Gesang der Jünglinge is generally acknowledged to represent a milestone in electronic music. In the wake of the year-long Messiaen celebrations, I was put in mind of the correspondence between Stockhausen’s electronic chorus, founded upon a single treble voice, and Messiaen’s birdsong. That liturgical sense ever-present in Stockhausen’s œuvre shone through, as did the alleluias of the refrain ‘Preiset den Herrn’. Another correspondence I made was with the Leipzig Bach recordings of the early 1950s from Gunther Ramin and the Thomanerchor, for Stockhausen’s heterodox Catholicism was always inviting enough to encompass other traditions. The recording naturally sounds a little dated nowadays, as had that of Varèse’s Poème électronique at the Proms. Far more important, however, was the sense of the Royal Festival Hall being transformed into a cathedral of sound.

The musicians of the Royal Northern College of Music brought us the London premiere of Lucifers Tanz (‘Lucifer’s Dance’). It is of course a pity that we were unable to experience a staged performance, but this was certainly not a gift-horse to be looked in the mouth. Having ‘resurrected’ himself following apparent death, Lucifer’s project here is once again to enslave mankind, on this occasion through facial gestures, the material of the dance. If staged, the orchestra would be presented in the shape of a human face; here, there was of necessity some compromise, but the musicians were still compelled to move in their seats, as well as to play, in order to convey some impression of the facial gestures commanded by Lucifer. We also missed the stilt dancer who would have represented Lucifer onstage; instead, though, we had the compelling visible presence of the bass, Nicholas Isherwood, himself. Magician-like in aspect and in sonorous deep voice, he acted as guide to and initiator of the sequence of Left-Eyebrow Dance, Right-Eyebrow Dance, Left-Eye Dance, Right-Eye Dance, Left-Cheek Dance, Right-Cheek Dance, Wings-of-the-Nose Dance, Upper-Lip Dance, Tear Dance, Tip-of-the-Tongue Dance, Ribbon Dance, and Chin-Dance. The straightforward word-setting – one could hardly be more distant from Nono or indeed from many of Stockhausen’s contemporaries – is fitted to the liturgical intonation.

As Jerome Kohl explained in his excellent programme notes, the music ‘is scored in the Dionysian “section style” of the big-band jazz’ Stockhausen remembered from his youth. I recalled the echoes of such style in Henze’s Boulevard Solitude, although here the influence was more structural than stylistic. The pulsating opening, which to some extent provided the underpinning for the rest of the scene, gave a fine sense of the ritualistic, continued in and heightened by the physical nature of the performances. Although some, though by no means all, of the music is frankly tonal, it sounds primæval – this is, after all, a creation myth – and in no sense suggests compositional exhaustion. Whatever else Stockhausen may have been, he was no neo-classicist, nor neo-anything-else.

Ably conducted by Clark Rundell, the musicians of the RNCM wind-band proved superb advocates for Stockhausen’s score, fully at home with his requirements. The three instrumental soloists, Marco Blauuw (familiar from this year’s Stockhausen Prom), Karin de Fleyt, and an unnamed percussionist (a pity, since he deserved recognition) from the RNCM, were equally excellent. Blauuw’s alternation between unmated and muted trumpet, to which certain extended techniques were added, was as flawless as one would expect, yet nevertheless deserving of comment. This is a worthy successor to Markus Stockhausen in the role of Michael. His unsuccessful – dramatically, that is – yet impressive soliloquy marked an especial highpoint, as did the splendidly despatched percussive Wing-of-the-Nose Dance, echoing yet transcending any popular origins. De Fleyt conveyed in her line – which would have accompanied a solo Totentanz (dance of death) on stage – memories of Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, her piccolo as sinuous and sensuous as I can recall hearing the instrument.

Following the concert, we were treated outside to a rendition of Michaels Abschied (Michael’s Farewell), from RNCM trumpeters. Standing on the Festival Terrace, surrounded by the sights and sounds of contemporary London, I was given to an uncharacteristically Cageian thought. The experience of hearing here Stockhausen’s music for the audience departing the theatre had the almost paradoxical consequence of making me truly listen to the sounds of the city and how they too might constitute musical sounds and progressions. The trumpet calls, once again excellently despatched, also recalled to me the brass leitmotif calls from Bayreuth, ushering the audience back into the Festspielhaus as intervals come to a close. What we really need, of course, is for LICHT to be fully staged. And where could be more appropriate than Bayreuth, out of season? If the new regime wishes to be serious about expanding its remit whilst remaining loyal to the spirit of Wagner’s principles, this would be a perfect statement of intent – and far more than that. Like Stockhausen, we can dream...