Sex, war and ice-cream: Stockhausen's Freitag aus Licht at the Opéra de Lille

Karlheinz Stockhausen became renowned – and infamous in some quarters – for his weird and wonderful ideas. Some of the strangest of them pop up in Freitag (Friday), the fifth in his seven-day cycle of Licht operas. A dancing ice-cream cone. A battle fought by black and white children. A typewriter getting frisky with a racing car.

It is that battle, seventh of the opera’s ten action scenes, which has seemed to make it unstageable, for obvious reasons. But the solution presented on the stage of the Opéra de Lille by Le Balcon was as sympathetic and imaginative as every other aspect of Silvia Costa’s staging. Black and white were soon interchangeable thanks to a hasty swapping of costumes and some fun with smoke-bombs, and the political heat of the scene was resourcefully cooled.

Freitag is nevertheless the weakest point of the Licht cycle, musically speaking, and while the performances under Maxime Pascal’s musical direction inspired nothing but admiration for their technical skill, fluency and dedication, Act 2 in particular never recovers from an initial and protracted sex scene of ecstatic instrumental melismas and oohs and aahs cooed by the protagonists bestride each other. The 12-channel layers of electronica swirling above and around us descended, in the battle scene, into an empty, thudding din sounding more or less like an arcade of space-invader machines on the blink.

Perhaps that’s the point: Stockhausen dedicated Freitag “to all children”, and while the subtitle of “The Temptation of Eve” gives a clue to the thrust of its elliptical plot, the text makes frequent references to Christmas, vindicating the decision of Pascal and Costa to place children front and centre of the opera’s action. In a booklet conversation, Pascal attempts to smooth off some of the composer’s awkward and unpopular corners by maintaining that in Licht he had realised a dream of making another world, “cut off from our own”, where everything is music.

Well, maybe. I would contend rather that, with Licht, Stockhausen sought to represent and consecrate every significant life-event and ritual familiar to his audiences (occidental ones at any rate), and many trivial ones too. Hence the presence on stage of the ice-cream, the typewriter and racing car in the tableaux of everyday objects which fill the “sound scenes” placed as electronic interludes between the drama of Lucifer tempting Eve, her relenting and her eventual repentance.

In Freitag, then, Stockhausen does Christmas, and Le Balcon’s staging shared in both the child-like delights and the profound mystery of the season. Each pair of dancing objects was unveiled one by one by a superb troupe of six child actors as if unwrapping the next present under the tree. The Act 1 scenes of children’s orchestra (pupils at the conservatoire in Lille) and children’s choir (the Maîtrise Notre-Dame de Paris, both ensembles drilled to perfection) produced a modernist nativity play. I heard a remnant of Silent Night in the vocal lines of Eve and Ludon (a second name for Lucifer), as they enunciated a typically epigrammatic libretto with echoes of St John unfolding the Mystery of the Incarnation (time-honoured climax of carol services): “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

At the same time, amid the sex and the war and the ice-cream, there is an almost quaintly conservative mind-set at work in Freitag, and the rest of Licht, which the staging gently probed. Stockhausen never stopped being the Catholic boy from Cologne. Once Eve has yielded to Lucifer and coupled with his son Cain, the natural order is disturbed, leading to the children’s war and to the dance-objects becoming jumbled up. It is her repentance and then her motherly scolding of the children and the dancers that returns harmony to the world. Whereupon the opera’s main action ends with a 12-part hymn, something like an interstellar Palestrina motet.

Eve was sung with phenomenal poise by Jenny Daviet. Antoin HL Kessel and Halidou Nombre were hardly less impressive as Ludon and Caino, shadowed at every turn by their instrumental avatars, flautist Charlotte Bletton and basset-hornist Iris Zerdoud. In the end, leaving the theatre to the whoops of backstage children and hanging back for half an hour in the glittering foyer of the Opéra de Lille, to be enveloped by the galactic electronica of the Abschied (Farewell), it was possible to conclude that Pascal is right. For Stockhausen, it really was all about the music.