Kroon van Wonders: Crafting a Crown of Words with Franco Prinsloo

Writing for the sacred always comes with a quiet kind of pressure. It isn’t about lofty declarations or grand metaphors. It’s about knowing when to step back — to let the text breathe, to leave space for mystery. That was the starting point with the libretto of Kroon van Wonders: not the passion, not the cross, but what follows. What waits in the silence.

Franco Prinsloo’s earlier oratorios had already carved out distinct spaces in this unfolding sacred trilogy. Kruis van Liefde (2020) was grounded in the crucifixion, with clear echoes of Bach’s Passions — formal, weighty, and darkly luminous. Lig van Waarheid (2022) turned to the birth of Christ, tender and radiant. Kroon van Wonders shifts focus once more. It opens at the threshold of resurrection — where things are fragile, not yet certain, and the language turns quiet.

My role in this process wasn’t to create something finished, but to gather, shape, and offer material that could serve the music. We drew from the Gospels, from old hymnals, from the poetry of Hans du Plessis. Some texts made it into the score almost untouched. Others were discarded without hesitation. The libretto was never meant to be a fixed script — just a structure, a kind of scaffolding that could hold the work in place while it found its own shape.

Franco’s process doesn’t reveal itself easily. He works in private, quickly, but without rushing. We didn’t discuss every movement or meaning. And that turned out to be part of the strength of it — the quiet trust that something would rise.

The Seed of an Idea

The idea for Kroon van Wonders arrived early — surprisingly early, in fact — during the initial stages of Lig van Waarheid. A group of us from Vox were at T’s house after a performance, the sort of evening where ideas tend to surface half-seriously, and then quietly linger. The name came first: Kroon van Wonders. We turned it over for weeks, weighing tone, symbolism, cadence. Eventually it stuck — regal but open-ended, resonant without being too neat.

From the start, the oratorio was meant to begin where many others end: not at the cross, but just beyond it. The resurrection and ascension accounts — scattered, quiet, and often overlooked — offered a narrative arc less concerned with drama than with presence, absence, and recognition. Franco asked me to begin assembling texts that might speak to those moments, drawing from all four Gospels but limiting the scope to post-crucifixion material.

To make sense of it all, I built a table of episodes across the Gospels — a kind of textual grid. It helped us compare language, tone, and structure, and it made clear which texts might lend themselves to music, especially in the recitatives.

One early structural idea was to base the libretto on Heilige Herfs, Hans du Plessis’s poetic anthology. The poems move through the seasons of faith — resurrection, praise, doubt — and often reflect on the miracles of Christ’s life. It offered a poetic and emotionally flexible framework, and at first, we thought it might hold the piece together. But the retrospective quality of the text, its tendency to look back at the earthly ministry of Jesus, soon felt at odds with the forward motion of the resurrection narratives. Franco’s music already carries historical resonance — clear references to Renaissance and Baroque idioms — and overlaying a second, more conceptual structure felt unnecessary. In the end, we used Du Plessis’s poems as occasional moments of inward reflection rather than scaffolding.

As the shape of the libretto emerged, it became less about constructing a story and more about following a line of tension: from absence, to astonishment, to release. Once we knew where the arc was heading, the rest began to gather around it.

Textual Foundations of Kroon van Wonders

The text was drawn from a range of sources, each chosen for a different reason — clarity, lyricism, resonance. At its centre is scripture: primarily the resurrection and ascension accounts from Matthew and John, though fragments from Luke and Mark appear as well. The base translation was the 1953 Afrikaanse Bybel, but we also consulted Die Boodskap and Die Bybel vir die Dowes (2007), both of which offered fresh turns of phrase that occasionally unlocked something musically or emotionally unexpected.

To help navigate the textual overlaps and differences between the Gospels, I assembled a side-by-side table of key episodes — a visual way to compare how each account handled particular moments. This became especially useful when shaping the recitatives, where the rhythm and tone of the spoken word had to carry not only narrative but mood.

Alongside the biblical texts, we drew on hymnody — specifically the Koraalboek (1952), including several texts by Totius. These provided moments of grounding and familiarity, anchoring the libretto within a recognisable liturgical sound-world.

And then, threaded throughout, are poems from Heilige Herfs by Hans du Plessis. These were not placed around the work as external reflections; they were drawn into its centre. Where the Gospel texts assert and the hymns proclaim, Du Plessis’s poems pause — not to interrupt the flow, but to affirm it. They hold a different kind of clarity: reflective, deeply rooted, and quietly resonant. In them, the emotional terrain of resurrection — loss, astonishment, praise — finds another register.

The result isn’t a continuous narrative in the dramatic sense. It’s more a liturgical sequence: moments arranged to move from uncertainty to revelation, from the empty tomb to the vanishing point. The words are there to carry that movement — and to stay out of the way when the music takes over.

Working with Franco Prinsloo

Franco began composing Kroon van Wonders in June 2024, while on sabbatical in Vienna. The break was necessary — a chance to step back, reset, and re-centre after what had been, by any measure, a difficult year. The oratorio wasn’t the reason for the sabbatical, but it became the thread that ran through it. Slowly, quietly, the work began to take shape.

Franco’s process doesn’t follow the usual markers of productivity. There are long silences. And then, almost suddenly, a completed movement will appear — fully formed, often with little revision needed. Kroon was composed over the course of nine months, a sharp contrast to the multi-year timelines of Kruis van Liefde and Lig van Waarheid. And yet, nothing about it felt hurried. He was managing other commissions, productions, teaching — all of it. And somehow, this work moved forward without ever feeling as though it were squeezed in.

Our working relationship was deliberately open. I supplied more text than he would need. He used what served the music and left the rest. There was no need to defend or explain anything. The collaboration rested on a shared understanding: that the text would be flexible, and the music would know where to land.

Franco doesn’t mystify the act of composing, but there is a kind of quiet inevitability to the way he works. His settings are never ornamental. He listens for where the line sits — how it holds its weight, where it turns, when it should break. The music doesn’t explain the text; it accompanies it. It makes room.

And then, on Easter Sunday — 20 April 2025 — the score was finished. It wasn’t deliberate. There had been no plan to time it that way. But there it was. A piece that begins with resurrection, completed on the day that marks it. No great announcement. Just a line drawn under the final page.

Reflections on the Work Itself

Hearing the full score for the first time was disorienting in the best sense. I knew the texts intimately — their rhythms, cadences, and silences — but Franco’s settings shifted everything. The music doesn’t sit on top of the words; it unsettles them, tilts them, asks something more from them.

There are big, dramatic moments — bold, unashamedly expressive — but they’re never untethered. The level of intensity is always shaped by the weight of the text. Even the most sweeping passages remain grounded. There’s no indulgence. The music responds to what’s being said, and often, to what’s not.

One particularly affecting moment comes in the setting of “maar Maria het by die graf gestaan en ween…” The music suspends itself here. There is no quick turn to joy, no resolution offered. The grief is real, and it’s given time to speak. It’s one of many places where the music seems to listen rather than lead.

Throughout the oratorio, Franco threads musical material from Kruis van Liefde and Lig van Waarheid into the fabric of this new score. These quotations are clear, sometimes direct, but never obvious. They emerge altered — developed, refracted, recontextualised. It’s not a gesture of repetition, but of continuation. Themes from the Passion and Nativity works are folded into new textures, where they take on different meanings in the light of resurrection. The trilogy is not bound by narrative alone; it is musically linked by this evolving internal dialogue.

The inclusion of poems from Heilige Herfs plays a similar role. They don’t interrupt the biblical narrative; they reflect and affirm it from within. Where the Gospels assert, these texts linger. They allow the oratorio to pause without stalling — to stay in a moment long enough for meaning to shift.

Kroon van Wonders doesn’t attempt to explain resurrection. It inhabits the emotional terrain that follows it: wonder, uncertainty, absence, peace. The music doesn’t resolve those tensions — it makes space for them. And in doing so, it leaves room for something rare: stillness without stasis, and faith without certainty.

Closing Thoughts Kroon van Wonders

Working on Kroon van Wonders never felt like a commission or an assignment. It felt like making space — for texts to speak, for music to gather, for something liturgical and luminous to take shape without needing to announce itself.

This wasn’t a collaboration built on constant exchange. There were no back-and-forth revisions, no tug-of-war between word and sound. It was quieter than that. I shaped the text. Franco shaped the music. Each of us gave the other enough room to move freely.

What has emerged isn’t a retelling or a reinterpretation. It’s a work that begins where many others end — not with death, but with what follows. Not with certainty, but with presence. If Kruis van Liefde traced the weight of the cross, and Lig van Waarheid the light of the cradle, Kroon van Wonders leaves us somewhere in between: after the miracle, but before the explanation.

Franco often speaks about the moment when Jesus says to his disciples, “Vrede vir julle,” and then vanishes. Not in the theatrical cloud of Renaissance iconography, but quietly — as a mist moves in, and he is no longer visible. That moment has become a kind of centre for the work.

The music doesn’t try to explain that moment. It simply leaves us there — looking into the mist, and listening for peace.