About the work
Sancta Susanna is Paul Hindemith's one-act opera after an expressionist text by August Stramm, composed within a few weeks in the winter of 1921. Together with Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen and Das Nusch-Nuschi it forms a loosely connected trio of one-act operas about kinds of love. It premiered on 26 March 1922 at the Frankfurt Opera under Ludwig Rottenberg.
Plot
In a convent church on a May night, the nun Susanna is seized by religious-erotic visions after her fellow nun Klementia tells her of Beata, who decades earlier, consumed by longing, kissed the crucifix and bared herself before it, and was bricked alive into the convent wall as punishment. Gripped by the same longing, Susanna repeats Beata's act and, at the end, demands to be walled in herself.
Cultural significance
The premiere triggered one of the biggest theatre scandals of the Weimar Republic; Catholic organisations demanded a ban, and conductor Fritz Busch called the work obscene. Hindemith himself suspended the opera in 1934 and banned it outright in 1958; it has only been performed again since the mid-1970s.