De Temporum Fine Comoedia
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De Temporum Fine Comoedia, literally A Play of the End of Time, is an opera or musical play by 20th Century German composer Carl Orff. It was his last work and took ten years to compose (1962 to 1972). Its premiere was at the Salzburg Music Festival on August 20, 1973, by Herbert von Karajan and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. In this highly personal work Orff presented a mystery play in which he summarized his view of the end of time, sung in Greek, German and Latin.
It utilises very unusual instrumentation: 6 flutes (doubling on piccolo), 6 E ♭ clarinets (3 doubling on B ♭), contrabassoon, 6 trumpets, 8 horns, 6 trombones, tuba, a consort of viols, electronic tape and an enormous amount of percussion (including about 100 instruments, 3 harps and pianos). In addition to loud percussive passages, there are also as periods of calm piano and straight dialogue. In this culiminative piece of his he almost abandons his diatonicism to chromaticism, this done to enrich and thicken the musical texture.
As the play is about to finish, after the destruction of all worldly material, Satan asks for forgiveness and is restored to Angel Lucifer, thus forgiven. The unsettling chromaticism here ends and Bach's "Before Thy Throne" strikes up.