When Jesus of Nazareth was asked what actually constituted the core of his “good philosophy,” he responded with the parable of the mustard seed to express what his category of hope, “Basileia tou theou” (Kingdom of God), meant: a new way of living together in community, already now, but motivated by the hope of greater success in the future.
Klaus Huber translates Jesus' vision in his description of the work as follows: “Concretization of the ‘new’ in ‘moments of supreme brilliance’.”
In 1975, Klaus Huber composed a finely woven chamber music piece for solo boy's voice, oboe, violin, viola, violoncello, and harpsichord. A boy quotes updated statements from Psalm 36 by Nicaraguan liberation theologian Ernesto Cardenal and then sings the Latin text of Isaiah's promise of eschatological peace (Isaiah 11:6-7) to the Bach melody “Es ist vollbracht” from Cantata BWV 159. For Klaus Huber, the boy soprano embodies “a new (better) world. From the short quotation, which fades out on the dominant (harpsichord, then cello pizzicato), the basic motifs of the beginning emerge individually and enlarged: the concretization of the ‘new’ in ”moments of supreme brilliance."
Over the course of the following eight years, Klaus Huber developed this independent short chamber music piece into a wide-ranging oratorio lasting over an hour: “Humiliated – Enslaved – Abandoned – Despised... for voices, choir, orchestra, and tape.” It tells of the alienated work of foundry worker Florian Knobloch, of the Brazilian slums, of conditions in US prisons, of the uprising of the people in Nicaragua, and of a vision of peace. The tenderly fragile chamber music piece “Senfkorn” (Mustard Seed) becomes a “window of hope” (Klaus Huber) in fifth place in this political and social oratorio. As in the parable, the mustard seed grew, as it were, into the tree of an oratorio.

Listen here: 8'05 min.