A planned performance of excerpts from the avant-garde 20th-century masterpiece has drawn condemnations of “elitism”.

Director Pierre Audi’s two-decade tenure with the Dutch National Opera has been slated to culminate in 2019 with a mammoth three-day performance of selections from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s masterpiece Licht, a week-long cycle of operas consisting of 29 hours of music. But the choice of repertoire has drawn the ire of a number of concert-goers, with a petition addressed to Audi calling for the performance to be cancelled.

The petition levels accusations of “elitism” at Stockhausen’s opera cycle, questions the funding arrangements and condemns comments the composer made in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the USA.

^{Cologne Opera’s 2011 production of Sonntag from Licht, photo © Klaus Rudolph}

Stockhausen made his controversial comments days after 9-11, stating that the attacks were “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” He continued, “Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn’t even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying; just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance...