Karlheinz Stockhausen
Michaelion

THE REVIEW

Seven reviews for the seven days of the week: today it's Wednesday from Licht.
(6/7)

Strange things happen in the sixth work of the Licht cycle: four helicopters (with musicians inside) take flight in the third scene, while in the fourth scene delegates from various stars gather to elect an Operator who can decipher messages from the cosmos: the galactic assembly takes place in a place called Michaelion...

Composed in 1997, the score of "Michaelion" includes a choir, a bass voice with a shortwave radio receiver, 4 winds (flute, basset horn, trumpet, trombone), one performer at the synth and 2 dancers. The piece lasts one hour, is divided into three sections and is a sort of summation of everything one can hear throughout the entire seven-day cycle: vocal and instrumental music, choral and electronic music, sound events that imitate the real world, sound spatialization techniques mixed with moments of brilliant virtuosity.

The sound cauldron prepared by Stockhausen is as always very dense, though I must observe that the entire Wednesday appears somewhat subdued, in my opinion, compared to the many wonders scattered throughout the other works in the cycle. One such wonder, coincidentally, is precisely the "Wednesday Greeting" (the electronic preamble of the work) which derives from the electronic part of "Michaelion", written for synthesizer, where pitches and timbres are divided into three groups like the 3 characters that traverse the entire cycle (Eve, Michael, Lucifer) and who on the sixth day coexist musically with fragments of their respective formulas continuously recombined.

These three electronic layers, in "Michaelion", are played very softly because the choir and instruments should prevail; as well as the figure of the Operator (the bass voice), who imitates the sizzling shortwave radio in 15 different vocal dialects and passes them to the choir for further transformation.

In the end, a core of six choristers rotate around the audience, scattered throughout the room, until disappearing through the exits. In Michaelion, the Operator is left alone, the lights dim, and the music fades out in a long dissolve.

- Mittwoch aus Licht (1992-1993 / 1995-1998) is the sixth work in the cycle dedicated to the days of the week. It consists of a Greeting, four scenes, and a Farewell. Wednesday is the day of cooperation among Lucifer, Eve, and Michael. As of the date of this review, the opera has not yet been performed in its entirety in a staged form. All the individual scenes have been performed multiple times in concert form and published on CD by Stockhausen-Verlag (except "Michaelion," available on DVD).