To mark the 150th birthday of Claude Debussy, the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin is presenting the composer’s oratorio Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien with a text by Gabriele d'Annunzio. The role of Saint Sebastian is being performed by Hanna Schygulla. The director Christian Filips, working with the musical director Kai-Uwe Jirka, has revamped the piece, which now features, among other things, interventions by young contemporary composers.

As the production program puts it:

“This will be a concert evening concerned with wounds: the city’s unhealed wounds and the wounds that it is said we must expose in order to be healed. The Memorial Church is also a wound. The fractured blue of the glass windows, composed of slivers inspired by the glass in Chartres Cathedral, corresponds to the detached colors that Debussy presents to our eyes and ears in his half-sacred, half-blasphemous music.”

Photo left: © Dorothea Wimmer