About the work
Donnerstag aus Licht (Thursday from Light) is the first completed of the seven operas in Karlheinz Stockhausen's monumental cycle Licht – The Seven Days of the Week. Composed between 1978 and 1980, it was premiered on 3 April 1981 at La Scala in Milan. The entire roughly 29-hour cycle, which occupied Stockhausen for 26 years, revolves around three archetypal figures – Michael, Eve and Lucifer – each embodied by a singer, an instrumentalist and a dancer. Thursday is Michael's day: the heavenly messenger, represented by tenor and trumpet.
Plot
In three acts the opera traces Michael's development. "Michael's Youth" shows his childhood and education: the awakening of his gifts in song, playing and dance, and his parting from his parents. In the second act, "Michael's Journey Around the Earth", Michael as solo trumpeter circles the globe on a giant model of the world, encountering foreign sound-worlds and an Eve playing basset horn, with whom he shares an ecstatic dialogue of love before Lucifer's powers mock him. In the third act, "Michael's Homecoming", Michael returns to celestial spheres. The whole is framed by "Thursday Greeting" and "Thursday Farewell", which receive and release the audience with trumpet sounds before and after the staged action itself.
Cultural significance
With Donnerstag aus Licht one of the most ambitious operatic projects of the 20th century began. The second act, with its famous trumpet solo "Michael's Journey Around the Earth", became an independent concert work and ranks among Stockhausen's most performed pieces. The opera unites song, instrumental virtuosity, dance, pantomime and electronic music into a total work of art in which – like Wagner's leitmotifs – each figure is assigned its own musical "formula". Thursday set the standard for the entire heptalogy and shaped the idea of a mythical world-theatre for our time.