The 70th Week

The audiovisual opera The 70th Week presents, in the maturity of João Pedro Oliveira’s expressive and compositional languages, the realization of a somewhat prophetic journey: the technical and material possibility of transcribing to the operatic scene a singular approach to the book of Daniel c.540 BC, one of the most discussed and interpreted biblical texts.

Between a historicist or historical fiction interpretation of the account of the young Hebrew exiled in the Babylonian court – instructed by astronomers and Chaldean magicians, persecuted for his fidelity to the God of the Covenant and recognized for his clairvoyance in the reigns of three empires -, to the interpretation of book as a canonical, prophetic and apocalyptic text – in the sense of revelation – there would be multiple hypotheses for adapting the text to an opera libretto.

When approaching the theme of The 70th Week, João Pedro Oliveira centers the meaning of his composition on the mystical journey of the prophet Daniel, so that all the elements and languages that run through the narratives of the eight scenes that structure the composition are intrinsically symbolic and inseparable from this. Anchored in the content of the corresponding texts, the eight scenes move from descriptive or illustrative planes to the realm of the poetic. The sounds and images, identifiable or not, evoke what is unspeakable and non-representable, suggesting signs, environments, and states of mind in an abstract perspective: they situate the emptiness and silence of the prophet in the face of idolatries and persecutions, dreams and revelations, culminating in his intimacy with the Divine, and designated by the angel as a beloved of God.

The concept of unity that structures the content and meaning of the approach to the Prophecy of the 70 Weeks in this audiovisual opera, a composition that addresses the present in a time facing the future, found in electronic and digital technologies the mediations that allowed to expand the interaction of the visual and auditory languages. They include all the expressions that give form and image, sound, movement, and dynamism to the musical and scenographic configurations, through which the Author created and transmitted his conception of the theme; especially when they provide the chronicle of a fusion, in time and space, of all the elements that can intervene in an opera.

In this unique case, the fusion of such a diverse group of elements recorded on video constitutes the core of a scenic representation that, not being physical, is also not ephemeral: the representation of different situations in the spaces of abstraction of the languages of sound and pure visuality. In this context, music and unidentified sound vibrations, human voices and singing, calligraphy and recitatives of incomprehensible texts, and the fragmentation of images such as dance movements and body expressions of dancers and singers, can be images of transcendent realities or figurations of the soul.

Opening itself to all interpretations of meaning, according to the memories and history of each viewer, the composition of The 70th Week appears as an opera that, being visual, can be representable – and perceived – at deeper levels than those that accompany some representations on a physical stage. In its universality, it will also be an opera beyond time. The composer updates the prophet’s vocation in a chaotic time in which wars and millennialisms are recreated. In Daniel, he reconstructs the path of human frailty, injured by wild beasts and fires, in the face of the power of empires and false gods, amid setbacks and exalting projects, while searching for his own transcendence.