Jan. 2, 2008
Start listening to Stockhausen’s LICHT. Granted, only five of the operas from the seven opera cycle have been recorded (or even performed in their entirety) so far, but Dresden Opera is planning to stage the complete work this year, in honor of Stockhausen’s 80th birthday. (Stockhausen died December 5, 2007.) Those performances will certainly be recorded to complete the documentation of the composer’s gargantuan project, easily the grandest (or most grandiose), complex and demanding musical composition ever undertaken. (Mittwoch is notorious for requiring four helicopters to hover over the theatre during the performance.) The five operas already on CD (Donnerstag, Samstag, Montag, Dienstag and Freitag) take up a whopping 19 jam-packed discs, so I’m going to need to get a head start to be ready in time for the release of Mittwoch and Samstag. And then of course, when the cycle is complete, I’ll need to go back and listen through the days of the week in order, to grasp the work’s convoluted narrative arc. But that’ll be a resolution for another year.