Deutsche Oper Berlin opens a new chapter under Intendant Aviel Cahn with the German premiere of Stockhausen’s monumental opera, staged by Susanne Kennedy and conducted by Maxime Pascal.
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mittwoch aus Licht, one of the most ambitious works of late 20th-century music theatre, receives its German premiere at Deutsche Oper Berlin on 19 September, in the first complete staged production of the opera in the German-speaking world.
The production, directed by Susanne Kennedy and conducted by Maxime Pascal, is the first major new production on Deutsche Oper’s main stage in the 2026/27 season and comes at the beginning of Aviel Cahn’s tenure as Intendant. Further performances are scheduled for 20, 23, 26 and 27 September.
Composed between 1995 and 1997, Mittwoch forms the Wednesday instalment of Stockhausen’s vast seven-opera cycle Licht. Die sieben Tage der Woche, a project that occupied the composer for more than two decades and assigns an opera to each day of the week.
Unlike other parts of Licht, in which conflict between the cycle’s principal forces plays a central role, Mittwoch turns towards reconciliation, love and the possibility of community. Deutsche Oper has accordingly made the work a starting point for the new season’s “Make Love…” theme.
A work rarely seen complete
The Berlin performances carry particular historical weight. Mittwoch aus Licht has not been presented complete on stage since its full-length world premiere in Birmingham in 2012, according to Deutsche Oper.
Before that staging, the individual components of the opera had developed largely independent performance histories. The complete work received its radio premiere on SWR2 on 23 and 30 October 2003, while its first complete scenic staging took place on 22 August 2012 at Argyle Works during the London 2012 Festival, in a Birmingham Opera Company production conducted by Kathinka Pasveer.
Stockhausen, who died in 2007, therefore never saw the complete opera staged.
The work itself consists of a greeting, four scenes and a farewell: Wednesday Greeting, World Parliament, Orchestra Finalists, Helicopter String Quartet, Michaelion and Wednesday Farewell. Its forces include nine solo performers, chorus, instrumentalists who also act, electronic music, synthesiser, dancer-mimes and sound projection.
Four musicians, four helicopters
At the centre of Mittwoch is one of Stockhausen’s most famous — and logistically extraordinary — creations: the Helicopter String Quartet.
Each member of the quartet performs aboard a separate helicopter. The musicians’ playing, together with the sound of the rotor blades, is transmitted electronically to the audience, while video feeds allow the four airborne performers to be seen simultaneously.
The technical specifications published by Stockhausen-Verlag call for four helicopters, four video cameras and television transmitters, multiple microphones and audio transmitters, equipment for transmitting a click track, television monitors, loudspeakers and sound mixing and projection equipment.
For the Berlin production, the quartet will actually take to the air. Deutsche Oper says the Helicopter String Quartet will be performed live as a one-off event, with the resulting film recording subsequently incorporated into the stage production.
The scene, written in 1992–93, lasts approximately 31 minutes and was originally commissioned by Hans Landesmann for the Salzburg Festival.
Maxime Pascal completes his Licht journey
Musical direction is entrusted to Maxime Pascal, who begins his tenure as Principal Guest Conductor of Deutsche Oper Berlin under Cahn’s new administration.
Pascal has developed a particularly close relationship with Stockhausen’s music through his Paris-based ensemble Le Balcon. According to Deutsche Oper, he and the ensemble have already performed every other instalment of the seven-part Licht cycle. Mittwoch was the missing day.
Deutsche Oper describes Mittwoch as the most elaborate of the seven operas, making its selection for the beginning of the new administration an unusually ambitious statement.
Susanne Kennedy makes her Berlin opera debut
The staging is by Susanne Kennedy, working with her longtime artistic collaborator Markus Selg, who is responsible for the stage design and shares the production concept.
Kennedy has previously staged Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach in Basel and Wagner’s Parsifal in Antwerp, but Mittwoch aus Licht marks her first opera production in Berlin. Her approach to the work is conceived as an immersive theatrical ritual, with Kennedy describing opera and theatre as spaces in which experiences of ritual and trance remain possible.
The unusual theatrical experience extends beyond the main stage. The Wednesday Greeting begins in the foyer 45 minutes before the performance, while the Wednesday Farewell is heard there after the final scene.
The complete event lasts approximately four hours, including intervals.
More than three decades after Stockhausen conceived musicians playing from helicopters as part of a cosmic opera spanning an entire week, Mittwoch aus Licht remains a formidable challenge for any opera house attempting it. Its arrival in Berlin now serves not only as a rare opportunity to encounter the complete work, but as one of the first major artistic statements of a new era at Deutsche Oper Berlin.
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