Completed in 2003, Licht remains something of a bridge to nowhere, never yet performed in its entirety. A 29-hour “spiral” of seven operas named for the days of the week, Licht stands as the maximum opus of Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), a mandarin of the avant-garde who idealized the abstruse, the more extreme the better. He’s also the dude who outraged much of the planet when he declared the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, in 2001, “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” (But then, Licht was as yet incomplete.) It’s said that Stockhausen’s monster sprang from his encounter with the similarly massive, woo-woo-to-the-max Urantia Book, supposedly dictated by angels under circumstances that put Joseph Smith’s whoppers about The Book of Mormonto shame. Three principal force fields in Licht are the archangel Michael, Eve, and Lucifer, but if you can make head or tail of their interactions, you’re light years ahead of most people. As the incoming director of Berlin’s mighty Deutsche Oper, Aviel Cahn trumpets his disruptive intentions with an inaugural four-hour production of Wednesday. That’s the segment of Licht into which Stockhausen dropped his one-whirlybird-per-musician Helicopter String Quartet, a logistical nightmare originally commissioned for the Salzburg Festival but canceled there under pressure from Green activists. The director Susanne Kennedy’s aim, we’re advised, is “to turn consciousness itself into a stage, guiding the audience into a trance-like state.” Maxime Pascal, a conductor with a taste for the unconventional, a brain for complexities, and an instinct for hidden melody, is likewise onboard, which is promising. —Matthew Gurewitsch