Based on »The Conference of Birds« by Farid ud-Din Attar

Our way of life is systematically destroying its own foundations. Why do we change nothing, even though we know it? Or do we change nothing precisely because we know it?

The starting point for the world premiere of the music theatre production »Welcome to Paradise Lost« is the medieval Sufi poem »The Conference of Birds« by Farid ud-Din Attar. In this parable, birds from all over the world gather to find a king who will save their realm from chaos and destruction. They decide to seek out the legendary Simurgh — the ideal of a powerful ruler and king of all beings. But the journey through the seven valleys to Mount Qaf, where Simurgh dwells, is long and arduous. And already the first excuses are found to avoid making the journey at all.

»Welcome to Paradise Lost« is a commission by Kunstfest Weimar for author and librettist Falk Richter and Weimar-based composer and teacher Jörn Arnecke. The two artists previously collaborated on the musical setting of Richter’s theatre text »Unter Eis« and now reunite for this co-production between Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar and Kunstfest Weimar.

Falk Richter transposes the Persian verse epic into our time. Now it is we humans who are visited by a swarm of birds, denouncing our political, cultural, socioeconomic and ecological failings — urging us both on a journey inward and toward a global reckoning to finally change the devastating conditions we have created. The result is a music theatre work that confronts the urgent sociopolitical questions of turbo-capitalism, climate change and the destruction of nature. Jörn Arnecke’s composition — for vocal soloists from the music theatre ensemble, a chamber orchestra drawn from the Staatskapelle Weimar, and a chorus of fifteen young people from Weimar — proves a congenial partner to Richter’s language-scapes, providing the platform for arguments and counter-arguments while simultaneously sublimating the floods of text and imagery.

Director and Weimar Opera Director Andrea Moses, Falk Richter’s chosen collaborator, will stage »Welcome to Paradise Lost« as a confrontation between the current bearers and beneficiaries of a self-destructive system and the youth protest movements that radically call their way of life into question. Audiences will be drawn into a kind of passion play, pilgrimaging through the various spaces of the E-Werk Weimar — the engine room, the boiler hall, the square outside the building, and back again — on the journey toward Simurgh, and toward themselves. They are driven by the burning question of the possibility and impossibility of resistance against seemingly insurmountable conditions, and how we might change them.

What are we willing to give up? What do we stand to lose?

World Premiere: 03/09/2022 — A commission by Kunstfest Weimar