De temporum fine comoedia

Scene 1: The Sibyls praise God as the creator of the cosmos and the world, but simultaneously proclaim the final apocalypse in which God will pass judgment on the living and the dead and annihilate the cosmos in a huge fiery torrent to punish human folly and greed. The righteous will survive this judgment unscathed and attain a state of eternal bliss whereas the godless will be lost forever and perish.
Scene 2: The Anchorites emphatically contradict the Sibyls’ prophecies of the end of the world: God the Pantokrator, the ruler of the earth and the universe, will never allow any of his creatures to be abandoned to destruction and eternal damnation. Even evil in the form of the Devil has its place in God’s creation. Only He can know when what He has created will come to an end. The Anchorites plead for “clairvoyance in a dream”.
Scene 3: “Dies illa”. The last humans on earth lament the collapse of the cosmos; the leader of the chorus prays to God and joins in the Kyrie calls by the chorus which culminate in a ban for all demons. Lucifer appears in a black suit of armour and is transformed back into his original form and role – he is now once more the “bearer of light”. The work concludes with the voices of the world and of heaven.
Carl Orff had been considering the idea of a large-scale stage work focusing on the end of the world for many decades. In his early work Des Turmes Auferstehung dating from 1921, we are already able to identify the concept of leading evil back into the divine sphere. In the 1960s, Orff devoted himself to a period of extended study of christological discourse undertaken by Augustine and set out by Origines. This eschatological philosophy with its concept of the immutability of God and his infinite benevolence and justice came to assume a great significance for Orff and also shaped the conception of the Comoedia in which numerous other religious and intellectually historical concepts and convictions were fused into a form of world theatre which virtually defied the dimensions of the stage.
The musical and performance technical requirements are extreme: in addition to the multiply divided women’s choruses (for the Sibyl scene) and men’s choruses (for the Anchorite scene) and three large mixed choirs and a women’s choir in the orchestra for the humans in Scene 3, a boys’ choir is required both to sing live and for taped music. The orchestra is dominated by a huge percussion section, 15 members of the brass section and 13 woodwind players. This is augmented by three harps, three pianos, celesta and organ. The strings have been limited to the darker sounding instruments: a viola quartet and eight double basses form a magical tonal level which is in part beyond normal audibility and only perceptible as vibrations. The viola quartet is assigned a special role towards the end: above the split chord of the eleven tuned glasses which are played in the percussion section, they create a transcendental atmosphere in the final bars of the work in which Orff has interwoven the chorale “Vor Deinen Thron tret‘ ich hiemit”.