Montag aus Licht

Montag aus Licht (Monday from Light) is an opera by in a greeting, three acts, and a farewell, and was the third of seven to be composed for the opera cycle Licht: die sieben Tage der Woche (Light: The Seven Days of the Week). The libretto was written by the composer.

Montag is an opera for 21 solo performers (14 voices, 6 instrumentalists, and 1 actor) plus mimes, a mixed choir, children's choir, and "modern orchestra". It was composed between 1984 and 1988. Monday is Eve's day. Its exoteric colour is bright green; its esoteric colours are opal and silver (, 200).

Montag was given its staged premiere by the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on 7 May 1988. Subsequent performances were on 8, 10, 11, 12, and 13 May. The stage direction was by Michael Bogdanov, sets by Chris Dyer, costumes by Mark Thompson. Karlheinz Stockhausen was the sound projectionist.

Within the Licht cycle, the opera Monday focuses on the character of Eve, on the feminine side of existence, on birth (, 33). Monday is the day of the moon, lunae dies in Latin, and the moon has been traditionally associated with the feminine, in contrast to the sun, which was regarded as masculine. In myths and legends, it is a symbol of fertility, and veneration of the "lesser light" of the moon is a cult of the creative and productive power of nature, of the instinctive wisdom and shadowy perceptions that rule the night. The moon is also the demonic form of the feminine principle, the blind force of eclipse, of destruction, of primal fear, as personified in the Greek goddess Hecate, though Stockhausen avoids these aspects for his Eve in favour of positive, creative, and invigorating features (Stoïanova 1999, 194–96). Montag is in three acts, with scenes and subscenes (called "situations" by the composer) as follows:

The Monday Greeting is a tape composition played in the foyer as the audience arrives. The visual impression is of being underwater. The music is multilayered, made of stretched-out basset-horn sounds, occasionally mixed with the sounds of splashing and rushing water. Twelve photographs of the basset-horn player in different poses corresponding to the twelve pitches of the mirrored Eve formula surround the space (, 334).

In the first act, Eve's First Parturition, Eve is manifested in three sopranos who have many names. They sing constantly changing names for the Cosmic Mother from the cult of Inanna and from early Germanic cults, so that they are Eve in many forms (, 123). The act consists of six scenes.

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