The Gesang der Weiden (Song of the Willows) is a slightly revised and reworked excerpt from the 6th scene of the opera Die Weiden. The work is for chorus a cappella (minimum 16 voices).

The opera Die Weiden is a journey 'into the heart of darkness' along a great river in Central Europe today, which, if you will, can undoubtedly be identified as the Danube. The story oscillates between a travel journey of two lovers who fall in and out of love and, a surreal distorted observation of today's current threatening developments.

Keywords: the Angry Citizen, the Vigilante, the increasing isolation from the outside and the brutalization of the social center - all this despite our heavily burdened history. This is achieved through pandemonium-like hallucinations of one of the protagonists as well as through the transformation motif man-to-fish.

(Johannes Maria Staud)