Sancta Susanna by Hindemith, Van (2024/2024), Geregisseerd door Florentina Holzinger,, Dirigent Marit Strindlund, Opernhaus, Stuttgart, Duitsland

So help me my Savior against yours” – despite her lust- and body-hostile environment, a young nun in Paul Hindemith’s one-act opera Sancta Susanna discovers her body as a means of experiencing herself and God. Hindemith’s open display of female desire on the opera stage had the potential to cause a scandal. In 1922, the Stuttgart state theaters withdrew the planned premiere in anticipation of the scandal. A good one hundred years later, Sancta Susanna is now coming to the stage in Stuttgart for the first time – in an opera performance by Florentina Holzinger, whose work brings bodies to spectacular borderline experiences. Holzinger follows Susanna’s act of self-assertion with her vision of a holy mass: Bach, Rachmaninov, metal and noise music as well as contemporary compositions come together in a musical Tour de Force in which church rites and mysteries experience an appropriation, but their relationship to sacrifice and violence is also reviewed. SANCTA counters the religious disciplining and punishment of sexuality as a path to spiritual ecstasy with a pleasurable alternative concept. In the search for transcendence, body modification artists* twist the religious topoi of crucifixion wounds, penetration, cannibalism and transformation; show magicians* present their interpretations of biblical miracles; the Sistine Chapel becomes a climbing wall, the opera a rock musical, God a robot, Jesus Christ a Jesus Christ Superstar. Holy Mass becomes a spectacle. According to Holzinger, magic and miracles must become a real possibility. Spidery and dark, loud and excessive, funny and redemptive, SANCTA challenges religious conventions while renewing them at the same time.