Stockhausen’s Mittwoch Aus Licht:Opera with real altitude

It has musicians in helicopters and in mid-air, seagull noises and a camel. Neil McCormick looks forward to Stockhausen's Mittwoch Aus Licht in Birmingham.

Laura Moody, cellist with Elysian String Quartet, must synchronise her playing with the sound of a helicopter's rotor blades doe 'Mittwoch'
Laura Moody, cellist with Elysian String Quartet, must synchronise her playing with the sound of a helicopter's rotor blades doe 'Mittwoch' Credit: Photo: David Jensen

In a cavernous, bare-brick room in a disused chemical factory in Birmingham, 11 musicians sit on metal chairs suspended in mid-air several metres above a concrete floor. Scruffy men in T-shirts and jeans haul on creaking ropes and pulleys, raising and lowering violinists, cellists and trombonists while they accompany an electronic score that sounds like a whale giving birth to a flock of seagulls, booming from a huge octophonic speaker system bolted to the ceiling.

In a sunken area, a thin woman with a ponytail operates a sound desk and laptop computer, issuing occasional musical guidance over the PA, her cool Dutch accent echoing in the vast chamber. A grey‑haired, bespectacled man stands behind her, listening intently, a big smile on his face. “When we hear the seagulls fly by we need a bit of reaction,” he suggests. A cellist mimes wiping something off his jacket, to general laughter, while a young woman approaches with exciting news. “The camel has arrived safely from Germany!” she announces.

It could only be opera, I suppose, but it is unlike any opera you may have seen before. The Birmingham Opera Company are staging Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mittwoch Aus Licht in full, for the first time, on an industrial estate in the heart of the Midlands city. It is a six-hour production of a notoriously difficult piece of music which features (alongside the flying orchestra and singing dromedary), a helicopter string quartet, in which four musicians in separate helicopters synchronise their playing with the rotor blades while hovering in Birmingham’s airspace.

“I’m not sure exactly where they’ll be,” smiles artistic director Graham Vick. “That rather depends on air traffic control.”

One of Britain’s leading opera directors, 58-year-old Vick has staged productions in most of the world’s great opera houses, from

La Scala to the Met. But the BOC is his real labour of love, an experimental company that he established in 1987, taking over various city spaces to stage bold productions of difficult pieces with the intention of attracting a new audience to opera. “The whole experiment is about changing the way people experience and hear opera, to try to remove some of the artificial barriers. My big thing is that you don’t need to be taught how to go to an opera. Your response is your experience, and if that mattered to you, that is as far as any performance needs to go.”

This attitude comes as something of a relief, since my familiarity with Stockhausen comes less from the late German composer’s complex theories and often obtuse scores than from his influence on experimental rock bands, from krautrockers Can to the space rock of Pink Floyd and synth pulses of electro pioneers Kraftwerk. This admission appears to delight Vick. “Stockhausen’s imagination doesn’t belong in opera houses. The whole idea of a soundscape is freed up if you create a space where audiences and performers intermingle. At its purest, directing operas is about creating a context and opening out receptivity. And that is what is at the middle of this whole opera: how you receive sound.”

Vick’s irreverent, experimental bent has given him something of a fearsome reputation in opera circles. In person, he seems immensely open and upbeat, cheerfully collaborative with his cast and crew and clearly having the time of his life amid the production chaos. “The music is really opening up for me,” he enthuses. “Stuff that looks muddy and confused and overlaid on the page has become very clear and shimmering. Once every numbingly controlled detail slots into place, the complexity drops away and you have a much simpler, more direct experience than you expect.”

Upstairs in the Argyle Works factory, run-down office space has been converted into a theatrical command centre, with a very convincing camel costume occupying pride of place on a threadbare carpet. The building is provided by a local business landlord for nominal rent. The BOC has a core of just four people and everyone else is brought in according to the needs of the project, with the voluntary involvement of hundreds of local opera and amateur dramatics enthusiasts. Supported by the Arts Council and Birmingham city council, this first ever production of Mittwoch Aus Licht was commissioned as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. “We couldn’t possibly afford to do it otherwise,” Vick beams. “Stockhausen’s absurd artistic ambition is kind of thrilling in its craziness.

“Every previous production of Mittwoch has run aground because it is expensive, musically really difficult, logistically extremely hard and doesn’t really use any of the resources of an opera company.”

Vick became intrigued with the piece while working briefly with Stockhausen on an aborted production of another part of the Licht cycle for La Scala before the composer’s death in 2007. He describes Stockhausen in terms of wonder: “An extraordinary mind and a dazzling talker, articulate to the point that you didn’t want to open your mouth. Fantastically enthusiastic about possibility. This stuff is creative play, really, with incredible intellectual rigour.”

Downstairs in the factory, Vick and his musical director, Kathinka Pasveer, encourage a trombonist to impersonate an elephant in a paddling pool, while overhead a bassoonist on a swing taps idly into her mobile phone. Pasveer was Stockhausen’s closest collaborator for the last 25 years of his life and has been preparing for the world premiere of his most complex work by coaching musicians one to one. “You need specialists for this music,” says Vick. “You need human beings who have curiosity and a sense of adventure. You don’t want to spend eight weeks passing people in the corridor muttering 'this is ridiculous’. I’ve done a lot of opera where that happens, and it drags you down.”

Stockhausen left strange scene-setting directions such as “a kindergarten with goats” and “Marrakesh elephants”, which Vick has been interpreting in free-associating fashion. “What’s liberating here is that we don’t have theatrical resources. I’m in an empty factory and I’ve got a lot of people from Birmingham and not a lot of money and we’re going to make it as it is. This is anything but state-of-the-art but there is playfulness, freshness and freedom, which is actually what the natural life of this piece is.”

The amazing thing, speaking as a relative novice, is that Stockhausen’s music really seems to make sense in this space. Researching the article, I found it difficult to get a grasp of Mittwoch, but during my day at rehearsals I was overwhelmed by the beautiful strangeness of the music, how all the sounds seemed to relate to one another and take on new forms in their very physical presentation. “Beauty is what it is aiming for,” says Vick.

“Hearing the seagull as a piece of beautiful music, recognising the music in the rotor blades, everything synthesising to the same idea. You do have your ears opened in the most extraordinary way.

“It’s not going to anybody’s idea of an opera but it will deliver something: an attitude, a philosophy, a colour, an experience. The whole point of doing music, for me, is giving voice to the unspeakable. We’re going to arrive somewhere that is beyond explaining.”

Birmingham Opera Company’s world premiere of Stockhausen’s 'Mittwoch Aus Licht’ runs August 22-25 (returns only). Details: birminghamopera.org.uk

The event will be streamed live on Wednesday 22 August at www.TheSpace.org from 7pm.