Our way of life is systematically destroying its own foundations. Why don't we change it, even though we know about it? Or do we change nothing about it, precisely because we know about it?
The starting point of the music theater premiere »Welcome to Paradise Lost« is the medieval Sufi poem »The Conference of the Birds« by Farid ud-Din Attar. In this parable, birds from around the world come together to find a king to save their kingdom from chaos and doom. They decide to seek out the legendary Simurgh - the ideal of a strong ruler and the king of all creatures. But the journey through the seven valleys to Mount Oaf, where Simurgh lives, is long and arduous. And already the first excuses are found not to start the journey.
»Welcome to Paradise Lost« was commissioned by the Kunstfest Weimar from the author and librettist Falk Richter and the composer Jörn Arnecke, who lives and teaches in Weimar. Both artists have already collaborated on the setting of Richter's theater text »Unter Eis« and now come together again for this co-production by Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar and Kunstfest Weimar.
Falk Richter translates the Persian verse epic into our time. Here, we humans are now beset by a flock of birds that denounce our political, cultural, socio-economic and ecological transgressions and urge us both to take a journey to ourselves and to reach a global agreement to finally change the devastating conditions. The result is a music theater that addresses the explosive sociopolitical issues of turbo-capitalism, climate change, and the destruction of nature. Jörn Arnecke's composition for vocal soloists of the Musiktheaterensemble, a chamber orchestra of instrumentalists from the Staatskapelle Weimar and a choir of fifteen young people from Weimar proves to be a congenial partner for Richter's linguistic landscapes. It forms the platform for the speeches and rebuttals and organizes Richter's floods of texts and images, which it at the same time always sublimates.
The director and Weimar opera director Andrea Moses, as Falk Richter's desired partner, will stage »Welcome to Paradise Lost« with her team as a confrontation between the current supporters and profiteers of the self-destructive system and the youthful protest movements that radically question their way of life. In the process, the spectators become involved in a kind of passion play, making a pilgrimage to Simurgh - and thus to themselves - through the various rooms of the e-werk weimar: the machine hall, the boiler hall, to the square in front of the building and back. They are driven by the burning question of the possibility and impossibility of resistance against the seemingly insurmountable conditions and how we might change them.
What are we willing to give up? What are we losing?
Composition commission by Kunstfest Weimar
Financed by 
