About the work
Sonntag aus Licht (Sunday from Light) is the last-composed of the seven operas in Karlheinz Stockhausen's cycle Licht – The Seven Days of the Week, written in 1998–2003. Its staged premiere on 9 April 2011 at the Cologne Opera was posthumous, more than three years after the composer's death. Sunday is the day of the mystical union of Eve and Michael, from which the new life of Monday proceeds – "in this way there is neither end nor beginning to the week; it is an eternal spiral".
Plot
The opera comprises five scenes and a farewell. "Lights-Waters" has soprano and tenor (Eve and Michael), together with an orchestra distributed through the space, conduct a cosmic dialogue. "Angel Processions" is a multilingual a cappella scene of wandering choirs. In "Light-Pictures", trumpet, basset horn, flute and synthesizer merge into translucent sound-images. "Scents – Signs" links the days of the week with seven scents and colours, carried by seven singers, a boy and electronic music. "High-Times" finally is performed simultaneously in two halls – by choir and by orchestra – who listen to each other in alternation and thus celebrate the festive marriage.
Cultural significance
Sonntag aus Licht crowns and concludes the most monumental operatic undertaking of the 20th and early 21st centuries. As a feast of harmony and union, Sunday forms the conceptual goal of the cycle, which nonetheless knows no final cadence but returns in an eternal spiral to Monday. Scenes such as "Scents – Signs", in which even smells become compositional material, or the double-choir "High-Times", show Stockhausen's synaesthesia and spatial thinking at their most uncompromising. Like the whole cycle, Sunday unfolds entirely from the superformula of the three archetypal figures.