Sancta

Paul Hindemith's short opera was supposed to be premiered at the Stuttgart Opera House in 1921 - but shortly before the premiere, the company backed out due to the scandal that was brewing. A good one hundred years later, Sancta Susanna is now being staged in Stuttgart for the first time ever. Hindemith's opera shows female desire in an environment hostile to lust and the human body: the young nun Susanna discovers her sexuality and pulls down Christ's loincloth on the crucifix - a scandalous work!

Florentina Holzinger takes Hindemith's opera as the starting point for her opera performance and supplements the work with parts of the Catholic mass, spoken texts and performative elements. In this way, she sheds light on our very personal and societal approach to the body, sexuality and faith.

Artistic Director Viktor Schoner: "Exploring boundaries and crossing them with relish has always been a central task of art. I am looking forward to working with Florentina Holzinger, her team and above all with you, Stuttgart's legendarily experimental audience, to leave our own comfort zone and ideally expand it. After Bach's St. John Passion and Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise, we want to embark on another search for spirituality with this evening - in a spectacular and certainly surprising way!"

Of course, theater and opera merely imitate reality: when people love, suffer and die on the opera stage, it's all just an act. The situation has been different in performance art for decades: Here the performer does not embody a character, here the body itself is the medium - and in Florentina Holzinger's works in particular, natural nudity is a central means of expression.

There has certainly never been an evening like this at the Stuttgart Opera House - radical and sensual, poetic and wild. We highly recommend this evening to all audiences who are boldly looking for new theater experiences! The first performances in Schwerin and Vienna have shown the euphoric and utopian potential of this production. We are now delighted to be able to present this highly virtuoso show in Stuttgart.