Rituals: One Morning Turns Into an Eternity

Presented as part of LA Phil Creative Director Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Rituals festival, One Morning Turns Into an Eternity is an operatic exploration of the life cycle. Celebrated theater director Peter Sellars teams up with Salonen for a journey that Sellars describes as “beyond emotion, beyond sorrow—into breath, into eternity.” One Morning knits together Schoenberg’s Erwartung, which follows a woman’s desperate, hallucinatory search for her lover in the woods, and Mahler’s “Farewell” from Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). Leonard Bernstein, an ardent champion of Mahler’s work, explained that “death becomes a synonym for eternity” through the composer’s gravely tender yet transcendent orchestration and lyrics about seasons, separation, loss, and rebirth. Between the vocal pieces, Salonen leads Webern’s five-part, five-minute gem, praised by Schoenberg for its ability to “express a novel in a single gesture.”