Sancta Susanna

CONTENT
The nun Susanna is kneeling in humble contemplation before an altar of Maria in the middle of the night when she is awakened from her trance by her fellow sister Klementia who admonishes her that she should become aware of her physicality.
 Through a church window which has blown open in the wind, the scent and rustling of a lavender bush floods in to the church accompanied by the moaning of a maid who is disporting herself with a knave in the convent garden. Susanna summons the ‘bashful’ maid and asks her with lenient understanding about her lover, ‘Willem’. The ‘young and sturdy’ knave appears to collect his ‘maid’. The experiences of this night remind sister Klementia of an event many years ago which she relates to Susanna who is listening spellbound: one night, a fellow sister Beata had kissed the image of the crucified Jesus while naked and was subsequently interred alive in the wall  behind the crucifix.
Susanna falls into ever-intensifying mystic raptures, removes her clothes, tears the loin cloth from the crucified Jesus in a state of intense ecstasy, falls to her knees and looks up at the cross. A spider which is crawling across the altar falls into her hair, causing her to fall to the ground with a scream. The other nuns who have been summoned by the prayer bell congregate for the church service, hesitate when they espy the motionless Klementia and then crowd around Susanna in a semi-circle. Standing proudly, she demands to be given the same punishment as Beata. When the nuns kneel down, Susanna resists this punishment in a ‘sudden vehemence’ with an energetic ‘No’. The scandalised nuns increasingly urge Susanna to go to confession, but Susanna stands ‘erect in inviolate grandeur’ before the sisters who are damning her.

COMMENTARY
Sancta Susanna was considered by contemporaries as the strongest of the three single-act operas. The fusion of religious devotion with sexual desire on the one hand is complemented by the inscrutability of determined religious obedience and inner stirrings of the soul. Numerous natural occurrences have been recorded in symbolist and naturalist literary traditions as for example in the works of Maurice Maeterlinck and August Strindberg. The closed musical framework and the characteristic primarily recitative style of the vocal parts directly convey the stringency of the plot. Conceived in symmetrical form with a monothematic character as a sequence of variations, the music displays slight reminiscences of Claude Debussy’s tonal language and unfolds in a luxurious orchestral magnificence. The entire musical development unfolds on the basis of the theme heard on the flute at the beginning of the opera. The convent world is evoked through an unyielding musical timbre and monotonous dynamics; in contrast, Susanna’s awakening sensuality is musically developed through expansive melodic lines and a glittering tonal richness. In 1922, Theodor W. Adorno summons up almost euphoric words on the subject of Sancta Susanna: ‘It is remarkable how Hindemith in the most mature of his stage works is here simultaneously able to generate the thematic surging of the orchestral torrent, wide-arching vocal melodies, the humidity of the night in spring and the cataclysmic power out of this single fundamental force in a solidified, sensual and plastic concrete form which only in his hands can be transformed into a symbol of animal instincts. (H.-J.W.)