Writing a new opera is an understandably scary prospect – weighty, dramatic, literary, expensive, and with many powerful and intimidating forces to tangle with. But for many composers, stage works are among their most significant contributions, and the culmination of entire artistic projects. The risks are high, but in recent years several new operas have also become significant box office draws too. Of course, box office is not the main consideration: as with any newly-directed production, newly-composed operas are a moment for a whole team of artists – authors and librettists, designers and directors, as well as composers – to leave a significant artistic mark on the landscape.
One solution to the intimidation problem is to avoid considering opera as something too overwrought or gargantuan, and to approach stage works flexibly and practically. It was an approach favoured by Benjamin Britten in his later career, and in the past four decades, British composer Jonathan Dove has written at least 30 stage works, on a variety of scales and subjects. It is an output rivalling the contributions of the most prolific 19th-century opera composers. Around The World in 80 Days is his latest, premiering this November at Zurich Opera, using a chamber orchestra and eight singers. As with others of Dove’s stage works, this is oriented at a youthful audience, the story adapted to follow the young protagonist Max, who like Max in Oliver Knussen and Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, is summarily conveyed to far-away fantastical lands.
Another British composer known for taking stage works by the scruff of the neck is Mark-Anthony Turnage. His first foray in the medium was Greek in the late 1980s, adapted from Stephen Berkoff’s play, a slyly artful, lounge-lizard updating of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In 2011, Turnage’s Anna Nicole also set Covent Garden alight, and his eclectic and all-encompassing music returns to the Royal Opera House in February 2025 with Festen, adapted from Thomas Vinteberg’s black comedy-drama: a tense and boorish 60th-birthday party which gradually reveals the terrible abuse of the father towards his children, while his party continues in a surreal state of denial. This disturbing and farcical domestic confrontation allows a large cast to flex its operatic talent: Gerald Finley, Eva-Maria Westbroek, Allan Clayton and John Tomlinson are all set to appear.
Bringing together many individuals on stage in a single drama is a strategy also used by Philip Venables, Nina Segal and Ted Huffman in their new work for Dutch National Opera, We Are the Lucky Ones. The piece looks to dramatise the experiences of an entire generation, with a libretto based on interviews conducted across Europe with over 70 people born between 1940 and 1949. “We ended up with an immense collection to draw from,” Huffman writes, “everything from raw, emotional confessions to banal commentary on the everyday.” “The generations following theirs – ours included – are not having the same experiences,” Venables adds. “Social securities are falling away, the political climate has hardened.” Venables and Huffman’s previous stage pieces have been searing and unsparing in their social commentary, and this new work looks to be no exception.
Another new opera derived from documentary sources is Beat Furrer’s Der Grosse Feuer (The Great Fire), based on an extraordinary documentary novel Eisejuaz by Argentinian writer and journalist Sara Gallardo. Based on interviews with an indigenous shaman named Eisejuaz, the novel is seen through the eyes of this syncretic religious figure, who combines Christian dogma with indigenous spiritual beliefs, the drama alighting on a strange relationship with a paralyzed white man Paquí who Eisejuaz one day discovers. Austrian composer and conductor Furrer has transformed this first-person narrative into a large choral opera, with the main role taken by the fine baritone Leigh Melrose.
Furrer’s finely-wrought literary modernism is mirrored by another composer, Francesco Filidei, who is also presenting a new opera in 2025, based on Umberto Eco’s idiosyncratic medieval whodunnit The Name of the Rose. Directed by Damiano Michieletto, the opera is performed at La Scala in Italian and then at Opéra de Paris in French, and like Eco, Filidei delights in the linguistic tangles this creates. Set in a labyrinthine Benedictine abbey, where monks are repeatedly showing up murdered in ever-stranger ways, the opera’s large cast of 21 progress through the story with arias in a symmetrical, arching structure, cycling around the chromatic scale. Filidei’s love of symmetry and modernist’s taste for the medieval would make him the ideal composer to put Eco’s famous novel on stage.
Unsuk Chin is also a composer with an exquisite sense of drama – and 2025 sees her return to the opera house for only her second stage work, after the acclaimed Alice in Wonderland of 2007. In contrast, The Dark Side of the Moon adapts a story from the composer herself, the protagonist a theoretical physicist who makes a deal with the demon Asteroth, with predictably tragic consequences. Inspired by the relationship between Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, the piece looks to capture the fantastical basis of physical reality itself – an artistic project perfectly suited to Chin’s combination of sparkling fantasy and crystalline dissonance. The opera will premiere at Staatsoper Hamburg in May, with music direction by Kent Nagano.
June 2025 sees another major new opera in Germany: Rebecca Saunders’ Lash – Acts of Love, a collaboration with writer and video artist Ed Atkins for Deutsche Oper Berlin. Saunders’ first opera, it is directed by the same team as The Dark Side of the Moon, Dead Centre (Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel) and follows a female protagonist at the end of her life, on the verge of death, with memories and yearnings washing over her – with the components of her psyche broken apart into four separate performers. Saunders’ works have often alighted on psychographic portraits of individual protagonists: a series of recent pieces are based on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from the end of Ulysses. Her previous collaboration with Atkins, Us Dead Talk Love, was a tour de force, and the new opera expands this previous work in a way sure to be tantalising.
New stage works are also moments for the opera world to make connections with major literary figures. Norwegian author Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, and spring 2025 sees Fosse in collaboration with composer Bent Sørensen, in Asle and Alida at Bergen National Opera in March. This stage work is adapted from Fosse’s linked series of novels Trilogien, whose strange, dreamlike drama is frequently set around Bergen itself. Sørensen’s music, which seems to exist entirely out of time, is itself dreamlike, poised between a refracted past and a broken future – it would seem well-suited to Fosse’s own brand of stream-of-consciousness.
Another composer whose music seems to hover out of time is Toshio Hosokawa, and 2025 sees a new opera written in collaboration with acclaimed Japanese author Yōko Tawada, premiering at the New National Theatre, Tokyo in August. Hosokawa’s first stage work since 2018, Natasha focuses on a wandering eponymous protagonist and another character Arato, searching for an entrance to the underworld. Encountering a Mephisopheles-like figure, he leads them, as Virgil leads Dante, through a series of all-too-human hells. Hosokawa and Tawada intend to straightforwardly depict humanity’s desperate failings, war, death and destruction of the natural environment, and gesture at how humanity might resolve such hellish shortcomings.
See all our listings of upcoming opera world premieres.