Tuesday 7 October at 8 p.m.

Teatro alle Tese – Arsenale

Stockhausen

opera

Michaels Gruß (1978, 11’)

Michaels Reise um die Erde (2nd act from Donnerstag aus Licht) (1978, 48’)

music Karlheinz Stockhausen                          

conductor Lucas Vis

stage direction and artistic project Carlus Padrissa / La Fura dels Baus
set design and artistic project Roland Olbeter
video and artistic project Franc Aleu

trumpet Marco Blaauw (Michael)

basset horn Nicola Jürgensen (Eva)

musikFabrik

La Fura dels Baus

light designer Frank Sobotta
sound Paul Jeukendrup
costume designer Chu Uroz
choreographer and assistant to the director Valentina Carrasco
dramaturgy Thomas Ulrich

production Wiener Taschenoper

with the contribution of Wiener Festwochen

in co-production with KölnMusik, musikFabrik

in collaboration with Europäisches Zentrum der Künste Hellerau, and La Biennale di Venezia

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) is one of the composers to have most altered the horizons of music in the 20th-century, and also the most popular. Not only because the Beatles showed their appreciation of him by including him in the album cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but also because entire generations of musicians belonging to the most different genres, from rock to non-academic electronic music and on to the latest avant-gardes, have considered him a guide, an interlocutor whose work has to be explored and discussed. One of the founders of punctual music, and then a passionate experimenter with electronic spatial music, Stockhausen wrote an enormous amount of music (over 350 works) and created titanic, paradoxical pieces, such as the 29 hours of music in Licht, seven operas for the seven days of the week, which he wrote over a period of 27 years, and which includes the concert for helicopters which moved up into the sky of Amsterdam in 1995 to perform the Helikopter String Quartet.

From the first day of the week from the Licht  cycle, Donnerstag  (Thursday) –that Stockhausen tackled after 1977–, was born the second act in 1978: Michaels Reise um die Erde, a musical journey around the world in which Michael with his trumpet visits seven places, each with a specific theme: he starts from Vienna (representing the theme of life, love, the feminine) to arrive in New York (the theme of conflict and war), and then Japan (the theme of comprehension and harmony), Bali (the place of knowing, of knowledge), India (which is instead a place of temptation and fall), and finally central Africa (representing the theme of death). The seventh station is represented by the movement towards Jerusalem: at the end of the voyage, Eva appears, seduces him and Michael ascends into the sky with her.