De temporum fine comoedia (2022)

In the first part of the Comoedia nine Sibyls announce the imminent end of the world and the eternal damnation of the godless. In the second part these prophecies are countered by an emphatic ‘No’ from nine Anchorites: the learned hermits have come to understand that the final day will dawn not as the triumph of a punitive God but as the absorption of evil into the divine. The redemption of all wrongs and the return of all beings to God reaches its climax in the third part in the retransformation of Lucifer into the ‘bringer of light’ that he once was. The fallen angel couches his plea for forgiveness in words from the parable of the prodigal son: ‘Pater peccavi.’ Brought to the Festival stage by Romeo Castellucci and Teodor Currentzis for the first time since its premiere in Salzburg in 1973, Orff’s opera-oratorio overwhelms the listener with its primeval energy. The latter results not least from persistently iterated rhythmic patterns that involve a host of figures animated by a mechanical principle of motion that will be translated into bodily movement scores by the choreographer Cindy Van Acker.