Karlheinz Stockhausen

Dienstag aus Licht (Tuesday from Light) is the fourth opera of the Licht cycle by Karlheinz Stockhausen, a greeting, two acts and a farewell about Tuesday as the day of conflict between Michael and Lucifer, with trumpets for Michael's side and trombones for Lucifer's. The greeting, Dienstags-Gruß (Tuesday Greeting), dates from 1987 and 1988. Act 1, Jahreslauf (Course of the Years), is dated 1977 to 1991 in the Stockhausen-Verlag catalogue, and Act 2, Invasion-Explosion mit Abschied (Invasion-Explosion with Farewell), was written in 1990 and 1991. The staged premiere took place at the Leipzig Opera on 28 May 1993.

Act 1 grew out of a piece commissioned for a Japanese gagaku ensemble, premiered in Tokyo in 1977, and its tracks follow the stages of the action: temptations, urgings and tutti sections, a piccolo solo, a harpsichord and guitar duet, a soprano saxophone solo in three formulas and a closing procession. Act 2 is built over the eight-channel electronic music that is also released alone as Oktophonie (Edition no. 41), and its tracks carry titles such as air-defense and invasion. The performers include Markus Stockhausen (flugelhorn and trumpet), Nicholas Isherwood (bass), Annette Meriweather (soprano), Julian Pike (tenor), Michael Svoboda (trombone) and Kathinka Pasveer (piccolo flute). The choirs are the WDR Rundfunkchor Köln, the Leipzig Vocal Ensemble and Die Musikalische Komödie, and Stockhausen conducts. The greeting was recorded in the Philharmonie in Cologne on 28 August 1993 and Act 1 there on 27 August. Act 2 was recorded in the WDR studios in Cologne between February and October 1993, and mixed in several sessions that ran until August 1995.

This is Stockhausen Edition no. 40, two CDs on Stockhausen-Verlag from 1996, sold in an English edition and a German edition, each with a booklet of about 200 pages.