Karlheinz Stockhausen
Weltraum

Seven reviews for the seven days of the week: today it's Friday from Light.
(5/7)

Also, the fifth work in the Licht cycle has an introductory part (the Salutation) and a final part (the Farewell): in this case, it consists of two lengthy pieces of electronic music that can be listened to independently from the opera's stage representation and that collectively bear the title "Weltraum" (the cosmic space).

"Freitags-Gruss" + "Freitags-Abschied" = "Weltraum": 68 minutes in the first part, 78 in the second. But despite the excessive duration, listening proves not too difficult. The music has dark tones, is very dense but has a slow unfolding on its side. A gigantic drone that envelops without letting up.

Stockhausen worked on this music in 1992 and 1994, assisted in sound production by his son Simon (as had already happened with "Oktophonie" a couple of years earlier). Commonly used synthesizers and samplers, effects units and – curiously – two vocoders were used. The vocoder is an effect that filters the human voice, giving it a metallic timbre: you hear it 40 minutes in, when Stockhausen himself slowly starts counting in German: eins... zwei... drei... An episode of little more than six minutes followed by the entrance of a female voice that intermittently laughs a nervous and mechanical laughter for 10 minutes...

The sounds are stretched to the extreme, seeming to adapt and adhere to the truly unusual length of this composition. But in the second part of "Weltraum", there is a gradual entrance of some deep, dry and marked sounds after about 13 minutes, repeated obsessively on the same note for almost the rest of the piece. Not a true melody, rather a thematic core that undergoes slight microtonal shifts toward the low or high register. As if an enormous glissando was being broken down into its constituent elements and analyzed under a microscope.

Now in the background of the eternal drone, now convulsive and up front, the percussion value of this core can be recognized. It alternates with Stockhausen's filtered voice, heavily distorted, counting the numbers multiple times, einsss ... zweeeiiiii ... dreeeeiiiiii .... (from 18' to 22') and reemerges again in the electronic magma around 55 minutes, counting from 1 to 13 for over twenty minutes until there remains only one sound in the mid-high register, held infinitely, and the voice that declares the last number, drrreeeiiizeeeennnnn..., until everything fades into the unfathomable darkness of cosmic space.

Two hours and 27 minutes have passed in the meantime... And those who ventured this far can only be captivated by this music of wild fascination.

- Freitag aus Licht (1991-1994) is the fifth opera in the cycle dedicated to the days of the week. It is structured in a greeting, two acts, and a farewell. Friday is the day of Eve's temptation by Lucifer. Freitag aus Licht was staged at the Leipzig Opera in September 1996. The record edition is published by Stockhausen-Verlag in 4 CDs (the Friday's Salutation and Farewell are CDs no. 1 and 4 of this edition).