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Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins, written in 1933, was selected for the Florida Orchestra's weekend program long before Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. But the opening lines of the Prologue seem eerily appropriate, given the thousands of people who had to flee their homes in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, some for a long time to come.
In Sins, the two sisters named Anna, a singer and a dancer, are on a seven-year tour of seven American cities to earn money they'll send back to Louisiana so their parents and brothers can build a new home. Bertold Brecht's lyrics, translated by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, are full of regret and longing for home:
So my sister and I left Louisiana
Where the moon on the Mississippi is a-shining ever
Like you always hear in the songs of Dixie.
We look forward to our homecoming
And the sooner the better.
And the sooner the better.
It's a month already since we started
For the great big cities where you go to make money.
In seven years our fortune will be made
And then we can go back.
In six years would be much nicer.