Originale

Originale (Originals, or "Real Characters"), musical theatre with , is a music theatre work by the German composer , written in collaboration with the artist Mary Bauermeister. It was first performed in 1961 in Cologne, and is given the work number 12⅔ in Stockhausen's catalogue of works.

Originale was commissioned from Stockhausen and Bauermeister by Hubertus Durek, manager of the Theater am Dom in Cologne, and his stage director, Carlheinz Caspari, who wanted "ein Stück, in dem Schauspieler, Maler, andere Künstler oder eben einfach »originale« Menschen frei in spontanen Aktionen auftreten sollten" ("a piece in which actors, painters, other artists, or just simply 'genuine characters' would appear freely in spontaneous actions") (Bauermeister 2011, 64). It was created while the pair were visiting Finland in August 1961. Stockhausen had been invited to lecture at the Summer University of Jyväskylä where, at a presentation of Kontakte, they met the piano virtuoso and Sibelius biographer, Professor Erik Tawastjerna. Together with the Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto, a summer house north of Helsinki on Lake Saimaa was put at their disposal, and the score of Originale was completely worked out there in just two weeks. The "silence" scene, in which the events on stage and the music stop for just one minute, and then everything resumes again, was inspired by the "unearthly" effect of the northerly summer light, which remained in the sky for just two hours or so during which the sun briefly dipped below the horizon, then rose again, "as the birds began to twitter, the fish stirred again, the wind came up, and there was day" (Bauermeister 2011, 64–66; Kurtz 1992, 114).

Performances of Originale subsequent to the twelve first performances in Cologne between 26 October and 6 November 1962 have been rare. Productions took place in New York in September 1964, organized jointly by Mary Bauermeister and Charlotte Moorman (Bauermeister 2011, 161), in 1990 in San Francisco directed and organized by Randall Packer (Kosman 1990; Tucker 1990), and on 21 January 2007 in connection with a 2006–2007 exhibition of Mary Bauermeister's tetralogy Fama Fluxus—Mythos Beuys—Legende Paik—Atelier Mary Bauermeister in Sindelfingen (Bauermeister 2011, 294).

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