Mit Sophie Rois als Fürstin der Finsternis, den Chören der Sing-Akademie zu Berlin und der Kammersymphonie Berlin

I know from experience how wearisome it is to live in the world of the dead. Being dead seems so dreadful, because you lack any prospects. Aren’t we all dead in this respect?

For the first time since 1876, Adalbert von Goldschmidt’s allegorical musical drama THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS will be shown in Berlin. The monster performance, which includes a huge orchestra, six opera soloists and a mass choir, was a sensation when it premiered at the Berlin Reichshallen (Leipziger Straße) back then. Volksbühne actors Sophie Rois, Silvia Rieger and Margarita Breitkreiz, teaming up with vocalists from the Sing-Akademie Berlin, set out on a journey to rediscover this forgotten piece, directed by Christian Filips. As it turns out, the ghosts that haunted the legendary Cafe Größenwahn in Vienna in 1876 haven’t ceased troubling us. Our world today is full of ghosts and revenants from the past. In opulent tableaus, the demons of the seven deadly sins bring their work of destruction to completion, and take us on a wild ride through the Prater panopticon to illustrate why the end of the western world is nigh: nationalism, belligerence, antisemitism, colonialism, stock-market frenzies and mechanisation, capitalist excess and narcissistic self-optimization have ruined it. Is there anything that can halt these developments? The poet-composer was confident that art was the answer. However, he soon faced political resistance: How dared a Jew and son of the Rothschild-Goldschmidt family from Vienna present himself as the prophet of modernity and Richard Wagner successor? The anti-Semites, who were in the process of forming a political party at the time, were ready to prevent this. Goldschmidt died in 1906, impoverished and fameless, in a sanatorium. None of his great works have ever been performed since. The deadly sins, the philosopher Vilém Flusser once wrote, are a torrent thundering over, and beneath, the human race, carrying it away in the process.

To the program film [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0enUL5zYXw]