A European oratorio for six ensembles, soloists, choirs and amateur singers in five countries – based on photos by Lee Miller and Jewgeni Chaldej.

The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the Second World War. In the face of global crises, an increasingly threatening situation and social divisions in Europe, confusion with this historic date seems more relevant than ever.

Against this backdrop, composer Marc Sinan is working with international artists and ensembles to create a multi-perspective European oratorio, to be performed in six different countries with different ensembles, and combined with video installations to create a collective musical memory and project for the future.

“Isn’t it profoundly incomprehensible that we humans are capable of almost superhuman things and at the same time fail on essential issues? We have mastered destruction, but not peace.”

The photographs by Lee Miller and Yevgeny Khaldei form the starting point for the musical work. The paths of the American photographer and the Jewish-Ukrainian war correspondent have crossed – if not personally, at least symbolically. Their images illuminate events and histories during and after the Second World War from radically different perspectives, yet they are linked nonetheless. They speak of life and death, the absurdity of war, and shed light on the meaning of liberation.

12 of their images and the stories that accompany them form the basis of a musical reconstruction. Together with the singers of the Neue Vocalsolisten, their images of liberation are reconstructed as living tableaux and transformed into video scenes. They highlight the abyss of war and the power of the idea of liberation from hatred and violence.

These videos are transformed into a 90-minute multimedia oratorio for a collaborative ensemble of participating musicians and six video installations, premiering on May 8, 2025. After the premiere, the installations will travel to the ensembles’ home countries and be transformed into chamber music versions of the oratorio – pieces of liberation and commemoration of past and present wars, in the unshakeable hope of the possibility of future peace.