Before the Met: Martina Arroyo Sings Stockhausen's Momente

By Daniel Okafor

Martina Arroyo, the soprano who would become a Metropolitan Opera diva, once sang Karlheinz Stockhausen. Film of it survives. The document shows rehearsals for the premiere of Momente, his monumental work for soprano, choir, orchestra and electronics.

The source material describes it plainly: "A document from a different time-frame, another world. The future Met diva was up for any modernism."

That's the whole story, really. But it repays a closer look.

What exactly was filmed?

The credits read like a who's-who of the German avant-garde. Martina Arroyo sings the soprano part. Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky, the celebrated piano duo, play electric organs. The Choir and Orchestra of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (West German Radio, Cologne) supply the massed forces.

Stockhausen himself conducts. That detail matters. Momente (German for "moments," a work assembled from self-contained musical blocks rather than a linear score) was his most ambitious statement, and he trusted no one else with the premiere preparations.

The film isn't a performance capture. It's a rehearsal document, and that's its value. The revealing rehearsal sequences show the work being assembled, argued over, coaxed into shape.

Why does the Arroyo connection matter?

Arroyo built her career at the Met, in Verdi and Puccini. Stockhausen built his in the electronic studios and festival halls of postwar Europe. Their meeting on film is the sort of crossover that simply doesn't happen now, and the footage catches a future opera star volunteering for music most of her future audience would have found unlistenable.

Interspersed with the rehearsal material, Stockhausen speaks about his youth, his working process, and the genesis and meaning of Momente. The composer in his own words, mid-career, mid-creation. Few documents of major postwar works offer that combination: the score under construction plus the composer explaining it in real time.

The whole thing sits, as the source puts it, in "a different time-frame, another world" — an era when a network radio orchestra would rehearse a titanic avant-garde score on camera, with an American soprano at its centre.

Anyone tracing either career, Arroyo's or Stockhausen's, now has a primary document to consult. Whether it circulates widely is another matter. Rarely seen footage tends to stay that way.