Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin

Karlheinz Stockhausen is considered as the inventor of pointillist music and moment form. The major representative of serialism was a pioneer of aleatoric and electronic music and also of abstract spatial composition. He acted as an unparalleled primary influence within the sphere of European post-war modernism, viewing the “zero hour” after the destruction during World War II as a historic opportunity for a radical new beginning. In his opera cycle Licht (Light), composed between 1977 and 2003 with the seven segments corresponding to the seven days of the week, he created a syncretic world theatre of creation with a total duration of around 29 hours, revolving around the archangel Michael, his adversary Lucifer and the ‘maid of the stars’ Eva in a monumental Gesamtkunstwerk of superlatives. The solo trumpet in Michaels Reise um die Erde represents the protagonist during a symbolic excursion into his own ego in which the music is a stylistic recreation of its individual stages (including Japan, Bali, India and central Africa). In Jerusalem, Michael finally encounters Eva with whom he becomes musically amalgamated in a “dense trill” (Stockhausen) in Himmelfahrt. Richard Wagner also manifested the profound dimensions of religion and ritual sublimity in Parsifal: extracts from this work are performed in the second half of the concert. Beyond the confines of Christian symbolism, a wide variety of different religious traditions are also blended in this Bühnenweihfestspiel [stage consecration festival play] (Wagner) – including the spirituality of nature and Buddhist and Schopenhauerian concepts. Between these two works which today are still shrouded in a nimbus of mysticism, we hear a key work of contemporary music –   John Cage’s 4′33″ – in which the composer created a fascinating exercise in attentive listening under the influence of Zen Buddhism. The concertante performance of Michaels Reise um die Erde provides the curtain-raiser for Deutsche Oper Berlin’s thematic focus on Stockhausen und Cage co-curated by Titus Engel.