Opera without Words

When I was in my twenties and just beginning to know classical music one of my favorite albums was the Opera without Words version of Carmen. The Bizet favorite has some of the genre’s most beloved tunes and this album was an easy way to hear those tunes without those pesky singers mixing up the mix. (My love of real opera was more than a decade away at the time). It’s likely I'd still play the Carmen album if I had it, partly because I like Carmen, the full opera, but it’s really long and quite boring in parts.

Saturday night I heard an opera without words concert. The Lincoln Center Festival presented Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Michaels Reise um die Erde (Michael’s Journey around the Earth). It was one of the greatest concerts I’ve ever heard and certainly THE most fascinating. (Having said that, let me add that twenty years ago I likely would not have gone; ten years ago I might have gone but not liked it; this is NOT the most accessible music out there).

Michael's Journey is the second act of Stockhausen’s opera Donnerstag (Thursday) which is itself only one of a seven opera cycle Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche (Light: The Seven Days of the Week). The entire cycle is twenty-nine (29!) hours long; luckily, Journey is only an hour in length and, as I said, it features instrumentalists only: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, 2 horns, 5 trumpets, 2 trombones, tuba, 3 percussion, harp, piano, organ, 3 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos and double-bass. I bother to list them only to show you that the orchestration is unlike any opera you're likely to hear on your local stage.

And that’s just the ensemble; there are also four soloists: two clarinets and a basset horn as well as a lead soloist, the excellent Michael Marco Blaauw on trumpet. (You could actually call this piece a trumpet concerto and get no argument from me).

I’m not sure I'm ready for the entire 29 hours of Licht, but, as I say, last night was breathtaking. At least twice I noticed my jaw had dropped and I was staring and listening with my mouth wide open.

In truth, it was the staging as much as the music that made this piece so compelling. The hall (Avery Fisher) was very dark -- unusual for a classical music venue -- and the musicians were set up in three groups, stage right and left, and upstage. The conductor was mostly in the middle where you’d expect him, but he picked up his music stand and moved several times.

The trumpet soloist moved constantly, spending most of the hour strapped onto a platform mounted on a hand-operated crane. He soared 15 feet or so above the stage, twisting, turning and looping – all the time continuing to play. It was dizzying and dazzling.

I know as I write these words that I am not conveying half of what the experience was like – I haven’t even mentioned the video images projected on a huge scrim that fronted the stage, or the satellite dish. I invite you to watch this YouTube video and read the New York Times review. You might then get a small sense of what the weirdness and wonderfulness was all about.