Who are Michael, Eva, and Luzifer?
They are all aspects of Stockhausen’s own creative self. Michael is the visionary, Eva is the human, and Luzifer is the realist. So Michael is the driving force, Eva is temptation – to give in to one’s human nature (always a distraction from heroic deeds), and Luzifer is the sceptic, the know-it-all, the Dirigent whose factual knowledge is limited to the real world and who acts as a damper on the spirit. The three-sided nature is a clue all the same to Stockhausen’s own inspiration. In ‘Some Questions and Answers’ (Stockhausen on Music, 136-7) he explains how the three aspects of vision, will (desire), and technique interact: “Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Stravinsky and a few other composers of the past have recognized the supremacy of intuition, based on the quality of the composer being a medium. He is a mouthpiece of the divine. … But there are long stretches in HYMNEN which I simply heard inside me while composing, and which I was unable to incorporate into the musical structure at t
