Internationales Musikfest Hamburg

Program Karlheinz Stockhausen Dritter Akt »Michaels Heimkehr« (Festival/Vision) aus: Donnerstag aus Licht / mit einem Gruß und einem Abschied

In many of his works, the pan-religious composer Karlheinz Stockhausen chose the everlasting struggle between good and evil as his central theme. This applies to his monumental opera cycle »Licht«, whose total running time exceeds even that of Wagner’s »Ring« at 29 hours, and which has never been performed in its entirety. In seven sections named after the days of the week, Stockhausen uses the three archetypal figures of Eve, St Michael and Lucifer to tell the story of human existence and humanity’s relationship with the divine. Peter Eötvös, this year’s Artist in Residence at the Elbphilharmonie, conducts a semi-staged performance of the third act of »Donnerstag« with a team of well-known Stockhausen specialists, the Europa Chor Akademie Görlitz and the orchestra of the Musikhochschule in Hamburg.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a great utopian, hence the decision to devote an extensive retrospective to him at the Hamburg International Music Festival. As head of the studio for electronic music at West German Radio (WDR), he used early forms of the synthesizer to create an entire cosmos of thitherto-unprecedented sounds, advancing into new musical dimensions in the process. His works breathe the rhythm of the stars, and get lost in the spiral nebulas of infinity.

»If we tax our mind to the utmost and arrive at the limits of what can be analysed and described, that’s where mysticism begins. That’s my home as a musician, that’s where I want to go.«

Towards the end, the eccentric esoteric even claimed that he was from the planet Sirius. Notwithstanding, Stockhausen was the best-known and most important post-war German composer, influencing artists as diverse as the Beatles, Björk, Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, Amon Düül, Aphex Twin, Kraftwerk and Frank Zappa. Stockhausen believed firmly in a higher plane of human existence, and he believed that music was the key to it. It’s worth following him on this path: the utopia of music lives on.