Ben Miller

<h1>AMSTERDAM — There was a palpable buzz on a recent afternoon in the Gashouder, a big, round former industrial building in a park on the west side of Amsterdam.</h1>

A buzz, that is, beyond the four helicopters whose steady drone was being relayed through banks of speakers set up to rehearse a crucial part of “Aus Licht,” a marathon performance of selections from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s eye-poppingly extravagant, never-fully-performed, seven-opera, 29-hour “Licht” cycle. (Divided into three hefty evenings, it runs from May 31 through June 10.)

Four women walked onto a stage inside the building. A moderator explained that they were the Pelargos Quartet, and they were about to perform from inside the helicopters everyone was hearing.

The women walked out a side door. Above the stage, four screens flickered to life. The audience saw worried-looking men wiping raindrops from a passing shower off the helicopters, which were idling a few hundred yards away.

The quartet members took their seats inside the copters, lifted their instruments, and began to play. One by one, each transmitting to her individual screen, they lifted off, playing and chanting, while the industrial ports on the outskirts of Amsterdam flew by beneath them.

If you’ve heard of Stockhausen, it may well be because of this bit of “Licht”: a Dada ballet for fume-belching helicopters and string tremolos that plays on the tension between the careful planning (not to mention financial and carbonous resources) needed to perform it and the pure, gonzo joy inherent in its conception.

Fantastical enough to envision on its own, it is just a tiny part of “Licht” (“Light”), into which Stockhausen poured almost all his musical output between 1977 and 2003. (He died, at 79, in 2007.) “Aus Licht,” a production of the Holland Festival in collaboration with the Dutch National Opera, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and the Stockhausen Foundation for Music, will present 15 hours of the work across three newly assembled programs. In an interview, Pierre Audi, the director, called it a “helicopter journey” through the piece.

The seven operas of “Licht” — each of which represents a day of the week — present a series of interactions between three main characters and their interlocutors: Michael, the archangel, who represents love; Lucifer, the fallen angel, who represents light; and Eve, who represents life. Elements of Michael’s story echo Stockhausen’s troubled childhood: Michael learns from his father and mother to love music, then watches his father die in combat and his mother be committed to a mental hospital. (Stockhausen’s father died in World War II, and his mother died during the Nazi period in the mental hospital where she had been committed.) Later in the cycle, elements of traditional plot fall further away, and the piece develops a more symbolic, ritualistic aspect.

Each of the three characters is associated with a melody or “formula,” much like a Wagnerian leitmotif. In Stockhausen’s unique high-late-modernist compositional style, these formulas are then expanded, inverted and built upon in an extension of serial technique, so that every pitch, timbre and volume arises organically out of them.

Though this may seem like a dully rigid way of generating 29 hours of music, Stockhausen’s work in practice has wild, sensuous, almost surrealist flair. After his bold early experiments in electronic music and the unusual physical arrangements of ensembles, his style grew more idiosyncratically spiritual, dealing with grand, obscure messages from the cosmos and performed largely by musicians (and family members) close to him, and for whom he became something of a guru.

In both “Licht” and “Klang” (“Sound,” a cycle representing the hours of the day, which he worked on from 2003 until his death), he assigned colors to different sections, associating them with moods and tones. From his earliest works, he was fascinated with the voices of children.

The “Licht” score includes sections scored for children’s and adult choruses, synthesizers, hundreds of brass players, orchestras, solo singers and, of course, the helicopters. These sections were mostly given individual premieres by Stockhausen’s own ensembles, and only later received staged productions. Each of the seven operas has been presented at least once, but never have all seven — or even a selection this large — been performed together.

Staging elements from “Licht” is not easy. Stockhausen composed the work to, and sometimes beyond, the limits of possibility for directors, designers and musicians. In addition to the notes, each score contains extensive stage directions that are difficult to execute — to say the least.

Some sections call for two separate halls, with the ability to open and close the visual and sound barrier between them. Some call for silver aircraft to crash on the stage, and for chrome-color walls to be sliced by lasers to reveal a surface of rock crystal. The 2012 premiere of “Sonntag” (“Sunday”) at the Cologne Opera contributed to a budget deficit so large that the theater’s director was forced to resign.

Audi’s “Aus Licht” staging uses light, smoke and video to approximate some of these more spectacular effects, but still required extensive building in the raw warehouse space where it will be presented; the audience will move to face performers moving among multiple stages, sometimes gathering in the center and in the aisles.

Producing even these selections will require hundreds of musicians, including 194 Royal Conservatory students, 14 of whom have been studying the piece in a special “Aus Licht” master’s program. Including technicians, 680 people are needed to bring the project off, and each day’s rehearsal schedule has stretched 12 hours or more. Audi, 61, predicted that this is more of the music than will be performed again in his lifetime; the financial requirements, in an era of austerity, are simply too high.

Stockhausen’s work has a reputation for spiky intellectual difficulty, but Audi shrugged this off. “It’s not an intellectual drama,” he said in a break between rehearsals. “It’s believing in myth, in ritual, in spirituality. It’s the naïveté of a children’s world, from which everything springs and to which everything goes.”

“It’s brilliant,” he added, discussing the gravely beautiful “Angel Processions” from the final opera, “because you think you’re seeing shamanistic priests. And then suddenly, there’s a whirling, crazy woman on the other end of the room doing something else. And that’s part of the wackiness of the thing. He saw life. He put himself on his own planet.”

The next day, the helicopters were back in their hangar, and a different set of musicians, mostly brass players, were rehearsing “Invasion-Explosion with Departure,” depicting Michael’s trumpets and Lucifer’s trombones in combat.

The Gashouder, decked out by the designer Urs Schönbaum with scaffolded stages and arcs of LED lights that can change color at the flick of a switch, glowed fiery red. Cameramen followed the groups of musicians as they ran, lunged and struck poses throughout the space, playing complex chords from memory and wearing metal headpieces loosely resembling radio towers. (The costumes were designed by Wojciech Dziedzic.) This section, the one originally intended to feature the crashing aircraft and laser-decimated chrome wall, still felt gripping and apocalyptic amid light, projection and smoke.

“If we want to bring this up to date,” said Elisabeth Lusche, a trumpet student in the “Aus Licht” master’s program, “what is the limit that we’re pushing now? How can we keep this true to what Stockhausen wanted, while still finding way to be extreme in the present?”

She said the master’s program, taught by Kathinka Pasveer, Stockhausen’s widow and the project’s musical director, along with other key Stockhausen collaborators and interpreters, had given students the opportunity to delve deeply enough into the forbidding technical demands of the music to develop interpretive agency.

“When we have the rehearsals,” Lusche said, “Kathinka’s motto is always just to ‘play it perfect and beautiful.’ And at the beginning we were like, ‘Yeah, OK, look at the score. I would love to do that!’ But now that we’re here, it’s something that’s finally clicked. And so what started as a joke, now it’s happening.”

When asked about that “perfect and beautiful” comment, Pasveer smiled. “It’s true,” she said. “There is a feeling new music must be straightforward. But Stockhausen was very emotional also, and it must always sound beautiful. Never ugly.”

She said teaching a new generation of performers to meet Stockhausen’s demands, which emphasize the physical, performative aspect of instrumental playing more than many other composers, brought her joy.

“These pieces are our children, my children,” she said. “And if they only depend on me, they die with me. So it’s important to see that after a long period of study, others can play this music so beautifully. The piece is alive. The child is alive.”

Later that night at the Gashouder, the Cappella Amsterdam and a second choir of master’s students rehearsed “Angel Processions.” The main choir, divided into small groups singing in different languages, moved slowly around and toward the center of the room, down aisles glowing blue with light and smoke.

The screens were back on, showing paintings of angels and close-ups of calligraphy that faded into live video of the singers. The student chorus, arranged in a circle around the periphery, sang a steady drone, getting louder and softer, cutting across the harmonies, creating strange new chords.

By the end, the small groups had united in the center of the room, lit by golden light. Pasveer, dressed entirely in white, sat, looking down at her score and then up at the performers, smiling. Everyone sang in unison, their voices echoing off the high ceiling. When they stopped, the sound hovered in the air for a moment — like a helicopter, or an angel.

“Aus Licht” runs May 31-June 10 in Amsterdam; auslicht.com.

This article originally appeared in <a id="75bea50c-15fb-4c0e-90a8-1789e01c14d6" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/arts/music/stockhausen-aus-licht-amsterdam.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Licht' Unleashes a Helicopter String Quartet

Four women walked onto a stage inside the building. A moderator explained that they were the Pelargos Quartet, and they were about to perform from inside the helicopters everyone was hearing.

'Licht' unleashes a helicopter string quartet

<h1>BERLIN — In a rehearsal room at the State Opera in Berlin, a few weeks before the opening of the company’s first new production of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”) in 25 years, pleasant anarchy reigned. The director, Yuval Sharon, giggled, skipped over a set piece, and untangled some ropes dangling from the ceiling. Dancers stretched and laughed.</h1>

Florian Teichtmeister, the Austrian stage and television actor who has been drafted as Papageno, his first operatic role, had just run through his mock-suicide scene with Lotte Lenya-style speak-singing and a sad clown’s face. He turned to the conductor, Alondra de la Parra, and began to apologize: “I know I couldn’t hold a tune if —.”

“Stop it!,” she interrupted him, with a smile. “Focus on the diction. But you’re in pitch, you’re very musical. You’re going to be great.”

Relieved, he took a drink of water, and Sharon — who runs the Industry, an experimental opera company in Los Angeles, and who last year became the first American to direct at the Bayreuth Wagner Festival in Germany — strolled over to discuss the suicide scene with de la Parra. “This is the part I can never explain to my son,” she said.

“It’s a game,” Sharon said. “But suddenly the game is deadly serious.”

The game of presenting a new production of “Die Zauberflöte” is deadly serious, indeed — especially in Germany, where the piece is particularly beloved and performed dozens of times annually in virtually all the country’s plethora of opera houses. Many families make annual pilgrimages to see the State Opera’s storybook 1994 “Zauberflöte,” directed by August Everding using sets and costumes based on 1816 designs by architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. (Schinkel, a local hero, also designed many of the buildings surrounding the company’s theater.)

For this reason, the company’s new general manager, Mathias Schulz, decided to keep the old production in its repertory and run it alongside Sharon’s new one, which has been given a gloriously magical infusion of marionette theater and flying effects. The new staging opens Feb. 17 and runs through March 16, and the old one returns for four performances, with a different cast, at the end of April.

It’s as if the Metropolitan Opera were to offer a fresh staging of “La Bohème” and then trot out its classic Zeffirelli production a month later. While opera houses will sometimes keep old sets and costumes in storage in case a new production turns out to be a disaster, it is highly unusual for a new show to be introduced with the explicit understanding that it will be presented alongside its predecessor.

“With Schinkel there is a historic link that’s very important for this institution,” Schulz said in an interview. “At the same time, there is the possibility to show that different approaches and different concepts are valid.”

Sharon’s first response was concern, he said of the plans to keep the old version around: “As though the optics of this were that they don’t trust that this is going to work, so they’re holding the other one in reserve. But I learned that was 100 percent not the case.”

In fact, he added, knowing that the house will keep the Everding production — which is easy to revive with star singers who might not have time for the weeks of rehearsal needed to make the flying work safely — enabled him to realize his vision unimpeded.

“I don’t think any theater would allow me to do this if it was meant to be the standard repertoire version they bring out every year for 20 performances,” he said, adding that the old production “is such a part of the spirit of the house that I understand why they wouldn’t want to let it go.”

Soprano Anna Prohaska started her “Flute” career at the State Opera as Papagena in the Everding production before graduating to Pamina, which she will play in the premiere of Sharon’s show. “The Everding production is beautiful for the freedom it gives to singers,” she said in an interview, but she ribbed how traditional it is: “It’s a little bit patriarchy-washed.”

If asked to return to the old production, she added, she’d attempt to integrate the rich characterization of Pamina she’s developed over weeks of work with Sharon. “The great thing about all this flying and this acrobatics and athletics,” she said, “is that you actually forget your nervousness about singing because you’re so focused on everything else.”

With three major opera houses in Berlin, the new staging will therefore be the fourth version in a single city. In such a crowded market, how do you reinterpret a classic opera with fresh eyes?

“I wanted to bring the piece to life in a new way without feeling like it gets suffocated through my narrow view,” Sharon said. He identified two main challenges. First, “Zauberflöte” has surprisingly large quantities of spoken dialogue, which in the mouths of non-acting singers can quickly become deadly. Second, he said, “it needs to have an almost childlike sense of wonder and also a sense of philosophical depth, because the productions that favor one or the other always feel like they’re only telling half the story.”

Marionette theater occurred to Sharon as a general solution. The singers will sometimes be strapped into flying harnesses and sometimes move freely around the stage, but always be attached to visible ropes, as though they’re being manipulated by invisible child puppeteers. The costumes, by Belgian avant-garde fashion designer Walter van Beirendonck, and the sets, by Mimi Lien, who won a Tony Award for “Natasha, Pierre &amp; the Great Comet of 1812,” allude to both the Mozartean marionettes of Salzburg, Austria, and the Bauhaus-era ballets of Oskar Schlemmer.

The dialogues will be replaced by the recorded voices of child actors. The magic — just like the magic flute — will be provided by Mozart’s music: While the singers will move jerkily and expressionlessly through the spoken dialogue, they will come to life, move freely, and sing with their own voices during the music.

The one exception will be Papageno, who, content in his role as a puppet, will always move fluidly and speak with his own voice. Teichtmeister is following the tradition of the 1791 premiere, in which Papageno was played by Mozart’s librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder.

A third set of problems with “Die Zauberflöte” seems more and more glaring: the specters of racism and misogyny. Audiences are offered no reason other than distrust of powerful women to believe the first-act switcheroo that reveals that the Queen of the Night, first presented as the hero’s savior, is evil, and that the slave-owning magician Sarastro is genuinely devoted to the search for love and light. Sarastro’s slave Monostatos is black, and his blackness is presented as the reason for his lust, sloth and rage.

For Sharon, it was important not to ignore these parts of the piece, but to point out the ways in which the opera’s overarching message — in his view one of universal liberation, in which the puppets’ move toward self-awareness mirrors the human search for free will and a consciously, collectively shaped future — overcomes its blind spots. The only change to the dialogue, other than shortening some of the longer sections, will be the addition of comments from the voices of the children playing with the puppets, critiquing the racialized characterization of Monostatos.

“There are these critical moments,” Sharon said, “where they stop and question it and say, ‘Well, why are we telling this story?’ and saying, ‘This doesn’t seem right, you don’t tell stories like this today, why are we telling ourselves this story?’ And I think finally one of them says, ‘Well, this must be a very, very old text.’ So then it just becomes part of the play, but it’s not a comfortable part of the play.”

Crucially, in Sharon’s interpretation of the piece’s final trials, which induct Tamino and Pamina into Sarastro’s masonic order, it will be Pamina who leads the transformation. Having spent the opera gradually developing self-awareness as a puppet, she will show Tamino that he is attached to strings, show him how to remove them, and then learn with him how to walk unaided.

After conductor Franz Welser-Möst, who originally suggested Sharon for the production, dropped out three weeks before the premiere because of urgently needed knee surgery, de la Parra was given the task of coordinating flying singers and coaching an actor unfamiliar with opera through one of the piece’s central roles.

“We all need a medium, a therapist and a masseur,” she said in an interview. But she seemed game. Asked if she was challenged by the flying, she showed a video on her phone from rehearsals for a recent, also acrobatic, staging she led of Mozart’s rarity “Thamos, King of Egypt.” Eager to find out what the singers had to go through, she had herself strapped into a harness and hoisted high above the stage.

Prohaska, quick to stress the help of the flying team and Sharon, mentioned one entrance in which she will descend from above while the stage floor is dropped to the basement level, leaving her dangling almost 60 feet above the nearest surface for one nerve-racking moment.

“I’ve been reading in the middle of the night about falls, even though I shouldn’t,” she said. “And I found a story about a stewardess for a Serbian airline in the 1970s who fell 10,000 meters and could still walk. So I figure, OK, I’ll probably survive.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="170ca686-967c-44ca-8c56-6301fb3d64ec" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/arts/music/magic-flute-berlin.html">The New York Times</a>.

Florian Teichtmeister, the Austrian stage and television actor who has been drafted as Papageno, his first operatic role, had just run through his mock-suicide scene with Lotte Lenya-style speak-singing and a sad clown’s face.

New magic for a classic opera in Berlin

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Ben Miller

Articles written by the author

'Licht' unleashes a helicopter string quartet

New magic for a classic opera in Berlin