Stone, Southwest Chamber Shed Light on Stockhausen’s ‘Licht’

There is no music, and never has been, to compare with that of Karlheinz Stockhausen. It operates on many levels--science, religion, magic and the occult. The name of the 70-year-old German composer, who lives outside Cologne with an extended family of virtuoso performers and acolytes, was, in the 1950s and 1960s, synonymous with the idea of music of the future, just as Wagner’s was in his day.

But we tend to hear much less of Stockhausen these days than we did then, and the all-Stockhausen program for solo flute that Southwest Chamber Music presented Tuesday night in Zipper Concert Hall at the Colburn School was a rare event. It served as the first of seven concerts (which are also held at the Armory Center) in conjunction with the exhibition “Radical P.A.S.T.: Contemporary Art in Pasadena, 1960-1974.” Stockhausen appeared at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1966.

For the past 20 years, he has been producing the grandiose operatic epic “Licht” (Light), a cosmic cycle of seven operas for the seven days of the week. The three main characters--Michael, Lucifer and Eve--come from “The Urantia Book,” a peculiar 2,000-page mythical treatise on Christian themes that posits that Adam and Eve came from outer space. But Eastern thought and music, as well as a visionary approach to acoustics, psychoacoustics and electronics are also part of Stockhausen’s nonpareil musical universe.

None of this, of course, helps the composer be taken seriously by the musical establishment, which is as suspicious of Stockhausen the mystic as it is of Stockhausen the technical control freak. La Scala began producing the “Licht” cycle (which is nearing completion, with only one “day” to finish), but found it too preposterous and handed the project to Leipzig. London is the only other major city that has seen any part of the cycle, a production of just one of the operas. Deutsche Grammophon began recording “Licht” but also dropped the project after two “days,” “Donnerstag” (Thursday) and “Samstag” (Saturday).

Still, it has been possible to get a sense of “Licht,” since some of its characters are instrumentalists, and Stockhausen has arranged music from the operas for concert purposes. It was on “Samstag” that Southwest Chamber concentrated, since the complete second scene is a half-hour flute solo, “Kathinka’s Chant.” Kathinka is the black cat who can lead the soul from a dead body to clear consciousness.

Stockhausen, with all seriousness, suggests that performing the chant several times a day for 49 days after physical death should accomplish this task. I don’t know about that, but I do know that this score, even in the solo flute version that Dorothy Stone played (there are six accompanying percussionists in the opera, and there is a spectacular concert version for flute and electronics), is extraordinary music. The flute becomes more than a flute. The music is a huge expansion of a complex melodic formula, and the writing for the instrument is fantastical in its range of colors and techniques. It ends with the flutist imitating the sound of trombones and then screaming to release the soul.

Crazy as any description of “Licht” may sound, I’m nonetheless convinced that it is already the greatest single operatic achievement since Wagner’s “Ring” and one of the century’s most astonishing artistic enterprises in any medium. Stone’s performances of “Kathinka’s Chant” and the airy “Zungenspitzentanz” (Tip of the Tongue Dance), from the opera, did nothing to dissuade me of that notion. She lacked the dramatic flair an operatic performance requires, but her virtuosity was a pleasure. A pleasure, too, was the inclusion of “Amour,” five unusually fanciful pieces Stockhausen originally wrote for clarinet in 1976 as gifts of friendship to loved ones.