Opera performance by Florentina Holzinger with Paul Hindemith’s opera Sancta Susanna, sacred works and new compositions in German, Latin and English.

“So help me, my Savior against yours” – despite her environment that is hostile to pleasure and the body, a young nun in Paul Hindemith’s one-act opera Sancta Susanna discovers her body as a means of experiencing herself and God. Hindemith’s open display of female desire on the opera stage had the potential to cause scandal. In advance of concern, the Stuttgart State Theaters withdrew the planned premiere in 1922. A good hundred years later, Sancta Susanna is now coming to the stage in Stuttgart for the first time – in an opera performance by Florentina Holzinger, who brings bodies into spectacular borderline experiences in her works. Holzinger follows Susanna’s act of self-assertion with her vision of a holy mass: Bach, Rachmaninoff, metal, noise and contemporary compositions come together in a musical tour de force in which church rites and mysteries are appropriated, but also their connection to sacrifice and Violence is processed. SANCTA counters the religious discipline and punishment of sexuality as a path to spiritual ecstasy with a pleasurable alternative. In search of transcendence, body modification artists* twist the religious themes of crucifixion wounds, penetration, cannibalism and transformation; Show magicians* show their interpretations of biblical miracles; the Sistine Chapel becomes a climbing wall, the opera becomes a rock musical, God becomes a robot, Jesus Christ becomes a Jesus Christ superstar. The Holy Mass becomes a spectacle. Magic and miracles, says Holzinger, must become a real possibility. Spider-like and dark, loud and excessive, funny and cathartic, SANCTA challenges religious conventions while simultaneously renewing them.