Licht, Stockhausen’s Legacy

For 26 years, the twentieth-century music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen worked on Licht: an opera cycle consisting of seven parts, one for each day of the week, lasting 29 hours. Completed in 2003, the cycle in its entirety was only performed for the first time in 2019 (at the National Opera in Amsterdam), twelve years after the composer's death and reworked into three parts of about five hours each. In the documentary Licht, Stockhausen's Legacy, Oeke Hoegendijk (My Rembrandt) follows the complex production process and reconstructs Stockhausen's eccentric musical universe. She also has an eye for his equally extravagant life, which was a drawn-out quest for love – a mystical quest in which the music was his infallible, and sometimes unfathomable, guide. Hoogendijk captures it all in this portrait of a musical genius.

“Hoogendijk follows the ambitious project of staging Licht, a never-performed lyric cycle by Stockhausen, through a film that does not hide the painful contradictions in the life of the composer. The documentary is both a fascinating chronicle of an extraordinary musical adventure and the biography of a man beyond myth.”- Le FIFA