Singen wir aus Herzensgrund

For the opening of Passion :SPIEL, the semi-staged choral installation, based on composer Mauricio Kagel's »Chorbuch« and the chorales of Johann Sebastian Bach, connects performers and audience and builds a bridge between old and new music. 

For his »Chorbuch«, written between 1975 and 1978, the exceptional Argentinean artist of the New Music Theater Mauricio Kagel arranged 53 of the approximately 400 surviving chorales of Johann Sebastian Bach, the world's most famous Thuringian, who also worked in Weimar for a decade. Andrea Moses extends the congenial Bach-Kagel choral music into the visual and spatial, unfolding a walk-in choral installation in the festival space stage of the e-werk weimar, with which the opera choir of the DNT Weimar welcomes the festival audience and gets them in the mood for this year's festival edition.

In Bach's chorales, which are familiar to us above all from his cantatas and passions, the singing people turn to God and to Jesus Christ in a collective yet intimate dialogue. They seek help, understanding and support in their daily concerns and needs. In a sense, these congregational songs are the evergreens of the Protestant faith. The direct dialogue between believer and believed is realized in sung prayer. Kagel develops his very own, original and abysmally funny view of this Protestant-German hit parade and the corresponding understanding of faith, which to this day is deeply inscribed not least in the East German soul.

Troublesome crossings of earthly valleys of misery and joyful summits of spiritual heights alternate again and again in this Passion play. »Singen wir aus Herzensgrund« transforms the e-werk into a church of self-assurance of present-day community, which arises from painful and joking moments of drifting apart and coming together.

Free entry!

Musical direction Jens Petereit 
Scenic design Andrea Moses
Space stage Aurel Lenfert
Dramaturgy Michael Höppner, Simon Berger
Dramaturgy trainee Gabriel Ascanio Hecker
Lighting Norbert Drysz, Peter Friedrich, Sven Minner

Gefördert durch die Kulturstiftung des Bundes.

Gefördert durch die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien.