Three biblical passages in focus: The Annunciation from Luke’s Gospel divided into five sequences, The Parable of the Ten Virgins from Matthew’s Gospel – five wise virgins, five foolish virgins, as well as the five senses inherent in the parable: and Solomon’s Song of Songs, which was also textually scanned for the senses.
Part I is about five different images of women, each portrayed as both foolish and wise. Inherently, they also always represent the image of Mary with a respective focus on one of the Annunciation sequences. So five women are portrayed from different angles, each carrying three characters: the foolish, the wise and Mary. They all relate to love. These images are framed by earthly-human love in the form of the man. Compositionally, the first part refers to Bach’s cantata Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, which also deals with the parable of the ten virgins.
Part 2: The image of Mary is replaced by Solomon’s Song of Songs. It symbolises the love between God and his chosen people, or between Christ and the Church as the Bride of Christ. Or yet, or also, for the love between two people? Historically often questioned, this question is not to be asked here, nor is an answer to be given; rather, in the sense of the indispensable, the beauty of the textual content is to be repeated.
Working with the material from Bach’s cantata “Wake up, the voice calls us” , a connection to the aria Erbarme Dich from the St. Matthew Passion is established, because the motifs are the same. It seemed interesting to me that Andrei Tarkovsky uses this aria for the final scene of his film Offret, so that again a connection can be drawn to the Gospel of John, since he refers to it – In the beginning was the Word. (Lisa Streich)
…with burning oil
Music theatre for ensemble, 5 female voices, 5 children’s voices and an actor
Commissioned work for the 2011 Pocket Opera Festival Salzburg
Music Lisa Streich
Director Thierry Bruehl
Woman 1 Katharina Schwarz
Woman 2 Irina Marinas
Ms 3 Reinhild Buchmayer
Ms 4 Sandra Quell
Woman 5 Nihan Devecioglu
Sailor Maximilian Pfnür
Salzburg Festival and Theatre Children’s Choir
