A funeral mass as an ode to life. Star director Romeo Castellucci, a regular at the Wiener Festwochen, has succeeded in creating a comprehensive visual cycle of creation and decay. Together with conductor Raphaël Pichon and the outstanding Pygmalion ensemble comprised of orchestra and choir, he now focuses on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s last work. Castellucci’s stage version of the Requiem does not apply to one particular individual; rather, it evolves into an ‘Atlas of Great Extinctions’. While Death itself draws ever nearer to us present-day human beings via dinosaurs and Neanderthals, the action on stage turns against the linear nature of our demise. An old woman dies and then returns. With Castellucci, the Christian hope of redemption in the afterlife becomes the necessary new beginning for the next generation. Circle dances and lavish extravaganzas of paints, materials and images oscillate between feasts of birth and genesis and solemn ceremonial farewells. Castellucci’s Requiem offers an astonishing combination of Mozart and the present, of death and birth, of vulnerability and beauty.