Premiering TODAY (1/30/22) at the Deutsche Oper Berlin

https://www.deutscheoperberlin.de/en_EN/calendar/production/antikrist.1299969

https://www.youtube.com/user/DeutscheOperBerlin

This hundred-year-old work has in the past run into predictable objections over the text, even though it's not at all "pro-evil". Check out the video clip, yikes.

The Antichrist enters a godless world. Summoned by Lucifer himself he reveals himself in many forms: through arrogance, discontent, lust, deceit and hatred, humanity is tested and tempted in the "battle of all against all". Yet the voice of God ultimately puts an end to the Antichrist: "Hephata!" / "Open yourself!" – the world seems cleansed.

Rued Langgaard's "church opera", composed in the early 1920s and fundamentally revised until 1930, is a monolith of the composer's works, which has no dearth of exciting and unusual pieces. Based on the Revelation to John he drafts an eschatologically defined mystery play that cannot conceal the zeitgeist of the fin de siècle. His highly symbolic text rife with associations can thus be read with the appropriate historical pessimism. Yet the dazzling music – shaped by the late Romantic, great orchestral sounds, yet always falling in on itself, and from which prosaic and austere details emerge – brings hope into the dark world. The artistic maverick Langgaard found in this a personal style reminiscent of Strauss and Wagner without neglecting his contemporaries Hindemith and Schönberg.

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Last edited by Mark Hayes; 01/30/22 07:51 AM.