Sunday Feature: Then There Was Light

LICHT, the vast opera cycle composed by Karlheinz Stockhausen between 1977 and 2004 is an enigma, and composer and broadcaster Robert Worby goes on a personal journey to find out why it divides critics and audiences. Stockhausen was the most gifted composer of the post-war European avant-garde. In the 1950s, his early works - including some of the first electronic music created - confirmed his genius. But LICHT wasn't so warmly received. In LICHT Stockhausen wrote an opera cycle for the new millennium, bewildering in scale, and frequently baffling for audiences, but containing music as challenging as anything that he'd written. The seven operas, each named after a day of the week, total more than 28 hours. It took Stockhausen 26 years to compose them, and amazingly its musical architecture derives from a three minute 'Super-formula' inspired on a trip to Japan. Robert Worby speaks with Stockhausen's family, life partners, critics, scholars and interpreters, who candidly put this extraordinary achievement in the context of his life and work