I HAVE HAD ENOUGH

“I Have Had Enough” is a daring new chamber opera that combines a J S Bach classic with a contemporary Australian composition to create an entirely original work based on the biblical Canticle of Simeon. It is a staging of two versions of the Canticle: one from the eighteenth century, Bach’s Cantata No. 82, “Ich Habe Genug,” and one from today, Jack Symonds’s “Nunc Dimittis.” In each half, a nameless character is about to die, and “I Have Had Enough” probes this mysterious process.

Director Kip Williams joins Sydney Chamber Opera to stage a bold and contemporary conversation between these two non-operas. Unfolding in the Parade Playhouse, NIDA, “I Have Had Enough” is a rumination on death, a collision between eighteenth-century Christianity in Bach’s anonymous libretto and twenty-first-century existentialism in Symonds’s adaptation of that libretto, and an examination of our history of cruelty and our unending battle for power.