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DIVINE COMEDY: STOCKHAUSEN'S ‘MITTWOCH’ IN BIRMINGHAM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2013
Abstract
Childhood play, leadership, suspense, thoughts of mediation and conciliation, Hamlet-like reflections on being and not-being, facing and conquering fears, and a hunger for stability and security in personal relationships, together with a full panoply of riffs on the colour yellow in European popular culture – many of them frankly unpleasant – are among the challenging ingredients of Stockhausen's Mittwoch aus LICHT, the last segment of the seven-opera LICHT jigsaw to be put in place. Stockhausen's operas are intricate literary puzzles or charades, every detail of which can be assigned a number of coded meanings. Despite bravura performances by an exceptional team of musicians, Graham Vick skated over much of the composer's uneasy symbolism in a brusque and simplistic arte povera production which, along with a battery of unsolved sound projection issues inherent in the score, placed altogether too much emphasis on the composer's dark side.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013
References
1 ‘The passion for the Hindoo Joques seems to have been first excited by a code of Gentoo laws, […] not by the code itself, but by the translator's preface, in which there are many solemn assertions impugning the Christian revelation, and giving the palm to Hindoo antiquity.’ Buchanan, Claudius, Memoir of the Expediency of an Ecclesiastical Establishment for British India. Part II, Chapter 1 (Cambridge: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1811), p. 23Google Scholar.
2 In ‘Moment-forming and MOMENTE’, from Stockhausen on Music (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1989), pp. 63–75Google Scholar.
3 ‘A real philosophy of history ought to bear in mind what for ever is and never develops. [The Hegelians] regard the whirling world as … the ultimate reality, and see its final meaning in a meagre bliss on earth – a hollow, deceptive, and sorry thing of which nothing essentially better can ever come through either constitutions, or legal codes, or steam engines, or telegraphs.’ Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted by Heller, Erich in The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1952), p. 60Google Scholar.
4 Maconie, Robin, Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), p. 400Google Scholar.
5 ‘The Chinese builds his world upon the harmonious action of the heavens and earth; regards the animation of all nature, the movement of the stars and the change of seasons, as a grand “world-music” in which everything keeps steadfastly in its appointed course, teaching mankind thereby a wholesome lesson. … All their music has from time immemorial been under state supervision, in order to guard against the stealthy introduction of any tone contrary to ordinance. Here we already meet with the pernicious influence of a bureaucratic pedantic state, as well as that of the prosaic character of the Chinese, upon their music … A people in whose tales and novels the climax culminates in the success or failure of the hero's state-examination could not but possess very feeble notions of the tonal art.’ Emil Naumann, Illustrierte Musikgeschichte (1880–85); in English History of Music tr. Praeger, F., ed. Ouseley, F.A. Gore. 2v (London: Cassell, 1886), Vol I, 8–9Google Scholar.
6 Other Planets, 177–78.
7 ‘You are always referring to my music, my music. What does it mean, my music? It's just something that has come into my mind and I am working all the time and that's it. So: I am a myth, I am a name, and if I go away then they just attach on something that vibrates within yourself’. Stockhausen, cited in Other Planets, 2.
8 Roland Barthes, Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1984), 124.
9 For whom, see now Martin Scorsese's Hugo (Ed.).
10 Barthes, Image – Music – Text, 153.
11 The phrase ‘zu schein oder nicht zu schein’ (substituting for the orthodox translation ‘zu sein oder nicht zu sein’) was a test phrase for a test in hearing acuity I encountered in Georg Heike's psychoacoustics class at the Stockhausen Courses in 1964. It was to see at what loudness level a listener could detect the difference between ‘schein’ and ‘sein’. Since Heike took over from Meyer-Eppler at the Bonn University Institute, it is possible that this was a test Stockhausen himself had been exposed to as a research associate.
12 The narrative thread by which Stockhausen's Michael emerges from peasant child to saintly hero is an echo of the rise in German folklore of his terrestrial alter ego Der deutsche Michel, otherwise known as ‘Vetter Michel.’