Le Balcon

Freitag aus Licht is the opera of dichotomy: between black and white, humanity and animality, temptation and repentance. What is the meaning of this tension that runs through the opera?

Silvia Costa: Stockhausen confronts Eva's world, white and orchestral, with Ludon's world, black and choral. In our society, oppositions are complex, subtle and fraught with taboos. In the world of angels, the opposition is raw, total, original. In our interpretation of this opera, we have tried to find ways of breaking down this dichotomy, while remaining connected to the structural principles developed by Stockhausen, which make Freitag so beautiful. To do this, we put the children at the center of the game.

Maxime Pascal: With Stockhausen, everything is music; it's impossible to explain it any other way. Inspired by the myth of Cain and Abel, the plot remains indecipherable unless we look for the source of this duality in the music itself, in its structuring. The opposition and union of humans, machines and animals is, for Stockhausen, from a strictly musical point of view, detached from morality and the world as we know it. His dream is to create a world apart from ours. From this reverie comes a single conclusion, common to all the Days of the Week in the Licht cycle: only music can save us, elevate us, stop wars, set us free. Stockhausen believes in this idea.

What role do children play in Stockhausen's work?

M. P.: Childhood, which is primordial in Licht, is always linked to war, and the world-work is undoubtedly a refuge for Stockhausen; it's a way of letting the trauma of having lost his parents as a teenager in the Second World War shine through. Secondly, the child always has the role of a creator in his operas.

S. C.: Dedicated “to all children”, Freitag aus Licht contains a spectacle within a spectacle: these are the three scenes with children's choir and orchestra in the first act, Kinder-Orchester, Kinder-Chor and Kinder-Tutti. In the second act, the children wage war on each other in the Kinder-Krieg. In addition to these four scenes, we wanted to accentuate the children's presence by adding six child actors, who “create” Freitag's world, instead of the twelve pairs of dancers foreseen in the score. I'm sensitive to the seriousness the children attach to their games, which for me are akin to a creation. The child's energy makes the game tangible and indisputable. Something tells us: “He's doing it, so we have to follow him”.

M. P.: Freitag's child performers put in a tremendous amount of effort to achieve the very high degree of virtuosity demanded by the score. They experienced it intensely, because for them, perhaps even more than for professional performers, the learning of this music is linked to the “experience” of playing it.

M. P.: Freitag's child performers put a great deal of effort into achieving the very high degree of virtuosity demanded by the score. They experienced the whole thing intensely, because for them, perhaps even more than for professional performers, learning this music is linked to learning about life. Stockhausen expects the performers, whether children or adults, to be themselves on stage, and we wanted to follow this direction during the rehearsals. Silvia, Freitag is the fourth Stockhausen opera to be staged by Le Balcon, and the first you've directed. How did you come to appropriate this work?

S. C.: Maxime introduced me to the work through in-depth listening and study of the score. He explained the inner workings of the Scènes réelles and Scènes de son. I then integrated readings of Stockhausen's texts and interviews, which were essential for me to understand who he was, how he triggered his ideas, and what the mechanisms of his thought were. Freitag required me to work not on dramaturgy in the traditional sense of the term, but on interpretation. I had to find an ideal scenographic and aesthetic structure to convey Stockhausen's intentions, and create a distinction between real scenes and sound scenes. I divided the space into two levels, with a “terrestrial” approach to the Real Scenes and an “Olympian” one to the Sound Scenes, as sound moves through the air. I then used concrete principles to create the objects, structure and costumes for the hybrid couples.

M. P. : I tried to make sure that Silvia knew everything in the score, and understood how each scene worked musically. One of Silvia's great strengths is her memory: everything is immediately integrated, with a powerful analytical drive.

S. C.: The children's scenes raised a number of questions for us, particularly the Kinder-Krieg (Children's War) in Act 2. It represents the explosion of a dichotomy that goes beyond this confrontation between black and white children. For me, the Kinder-Krieg is a creative, cosmic war; a Big Bang caused by the outburst of the children's imagination, which breaks down the dual opposition that structures the opera and gives life to new beings, the hybrids, symbols of a total integration of the forces that opposed each other.

How do you analyze the music on Freitag aus Licht?

M. P.: Freitag is a musical phrase that reverberates everywhere, all the time. Licht is like a ceremony marked by repetition, incantation and psalmody; this is particularly pronounced in Vendredi. It's a block, a formula for two voices, each a mirror of the other. This phrase is sung in every scene: twice during Antrag, twice during Kinder- Orchester, twice in Kinder-Chor, and so on. It was important for me to convey this idea to the performers, to make them aware of the extent to which the opera's DNA is reflected in every moment. So I set up the musical rehearsals as moments of analysis and transmission, with both adult and child performers. Friday's phrase is divided into twelve parts: I wanted to help everyone identify and hear each of these twelve segments, which then form characters, represented visually by the twelve couples of the Sound Scenes. I would add that musically, Freitag moves away from Licht's early operas and closer to what Stockhausen would later do, in the Klang cycle. This madrigal characteristic, with instruments and voices alternating and interchanging, reveals the inventive power of a music whose expressive force is above all melodic and harmonic.

S. C.: The strangeness of the music in Freitag aus Licht fascinates me in that it is the product of a structure of millimetric precision, which creates a strong hypnotic effect. You can see this as soon as you leaf through the score, which is covered with handwritten indications, diagrams and timings. Electronic music, of which Stockhausen was one of the pioneers, has been a vector of freedom of expression, breaking down hierarchies between creators and means of production, and freeing certain creators from dependence on orchestras. This is what I feel in Freitag: a great accuracy that comes from great precision. Stockhausen created a work just as he wanted it. All the components are interwoven. It's an ensemble of flows, a music necessary to itself, as if in autarky.

M. P.: Strangeness and freedom are connected. It’s strange because it’s free.