“LICHT: Stockhausen’s Legacy”, the documentary about the composer and his titanic operatic cycle, premieres at Barcelona’s In-Edit.
This Monday, 31st October, and next Sunday, 6th November, the Aribau multiplex in Barcelona will be hosting screenings of the documentary LICHT: Stockhausen’s Legacy, which is being shown in the official international section of the twentieth edition of the In-Edit festival, which kicked off yesterday.
LICHT: Stockhausen’s Legacy, 122 minutes long, produced by Witfilm and directed by the Dutch director Oeke Hoogendijk, received the Jury Prize last March at the 40th edition of the prestigious International Festival of Films on Art, known as Le FIFA, which is held annually in the Canadian city of Montreal.
LICHT (Die sieben Tage der Woche) [Light: The Seven Days of the Week] was the gigantic operatic project of the totemic German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, a 29-hour opera divided into seven chapters, one for each day of the week, which Stockhausen completed in 2003, four years before his death, and which had taken him 26 years to finish. However, this great work was never performed in its entirety: too complicated to produce, almost impossible to realise logistically and too expensive to produce. No opera company dared to attempt it… until 2019, when the Netherlands National Opera, the Netherlands Festival, the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and the Stockhausen Foundation for Music decided to take up the challenge and stage aus LICHT from 31 May to 10 June 2019 at the Gashouder in Amsterdam, the longest performance of the opera cycle, condensing the twenty-nine hours of the original score into fifteen, with stage direction by the famed Franco-Lebanese conductor Pierre Audi and musical direction by the flautist Kathinka Pasveer, a close collaborator of the composer and co-director of the Stockhausen Foundation. Licht: Stockhausen’s Legacy reconstructs Stockhausen’s musical universe on the basis of the staging of this opera cycle, against the background of his dramatic life story. Hoogendijk portrays Stockhausen’s mystical universe, in which two obsessions played an important role: the dedication to his work and the incessant search for love. He talks about his children and the four women with whom he shared his life. Two of them, Suzanne Stephens and Kathinka Pasveer, lived and worked with him during his last years. As musical and dramaturgical advisor (Stephens) and musical director (Pasveer), both play a prominent role in the opera cycle. They fervently guard Stockhausen’s legacy, which leads them to debate with Audi, who wants to modernise the work and make it accessible to a new audience. Just as Stockhausen went his own way in composing LICHT, Audi also wants to leave her mark on the iconic piece. For the two women, this production is a unique opportunity to see the work of their mentor and lover finally performed as a cycle.