About the work
„Stockhausen for Children: Michael's Journey" is a child-friendly approach to Karlheinz Stockhausen's „Michael's Journey Around the Earth", the second act of his opera „Donnerstag aus Licht" (Thursday from Light). The latter belongs to the monumental seven-part opera cycle „Licht", on which Stockhausen worked for over 25 years. The largely wordless work places a solo trumpet at its centre.
Plot
At the centre stands the figure of Michael, embodied by a solo trumpet, which undertakes a journey around the earth. On its way it crosses various stations and regions of the world, meets other instruments and sound-figures and enters into dialogue with them — most famously in an intimate exchange with a basset horn that embodies the figure Eva. Instead of a narrated plot in the conventional sense, a musical journey of encounter, contest, love and homecoming unfolds, shaped entirely from sound, movement and space. The children's version opens up this avant-garde listening adventure to young audiences by accompanying Michael's path vividly and playfully.
Cultural significance
Stockhausen's „Licht" cycle is among the most ambitious projects in the history of music; „Michael's Journey" is one of its best-known and most-performed individual pieces. Children's versions such as this are among the boldest education formats of the opera houses, because they bring young listeners into direct contact with the musical avant-garde of the twentieth century.