Six hours with Stockhausen

Arriving for the world première of Stockhausen’s opera Mittwoch aus Licht (Wednesday from Light), we were greeted by the sight of two Bactrian camels, delightful and patient creatures, standing almost immobile for at least an hour while many visitors inspected them, before leaving in Joseph’s Amazing Camels coach. The one we saw later on stage was a pantomime camel, out of which, unzipped, a man stepped, after the animal had done an elaborate dance and been offered champagne. Zany and utopian, this is characteristic Stockhausen as I remember his works from the 1970s, before his long semi-eclipse, as people lost patience with his pretensions, his extreme prolixity, the tiresomeness of his childish sense of humour, the sheer datedness of what he was producing. The seven-instalment Licht, twice as long as Wagner’s Ring, attracted less and less interest, only the devoutest disciples hanging on after Donnerstag.

Mittwoch has attracted a good deal of media attention, especially for the camels and for the string quartet, for which each performer takes off in a separate helicopter, and varies what he or she is playing depending on the decisions the pilot takes as to what the machine is doing, and the rhythms of the motor blades. The BBC Radio 1 DJ Nihal interviewed them first, then we followed them on giant screens as they mounted the helicopters, took off, played frantically for about 40 minutes, landed and were questioned by members of the audience. Clearly this kind of thing leaves what one thinks of as the Total Work of Art hanging in the dusty rear.

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Apart from that, it raises the questions of what kind of audience Stockhausen envisaged and what the point of the enterprise is. No wonder the place was stiff with suits, arts management persons seeing how many boxes were being ticked and no doubt thinking in terms of viability and the contribution that was being made to the Cultural Olympics.