Two striking chamber operas premiere in a double bill that brings us face-to-face with the climate crisis.

After My Breath, a love letter to Greta Thunberg, is a bold new chamber opera for solo soprano, drawn from moments in the life of climate activist Greta Thunberg.

Across six searing scenes, from a childhood filled with the glorious music of her opera singer mother, to global stages and determined acts of public protest, the opera traces one voice finding its power. Weaving together Thunberg’s story with echoes of Mozart, Puccini and Bizet, it asks what it truly means to speak when the world refuses to listen. 

Written and composed by Lisa Logan, the melodic score builds from an intimate whisper to impassioned declaration. At its heart, a refrain: “I am one voice. I was never meant to be the only one.” Urgent, poetic, and deeply human.

In their new chamber opera Eden 2.0, librettist Alexia Peniguel and composer William Gardner take the Garden of Eden as their starting point and ask: what if creation could be rebooted, but this time the tree of knowledge was sanctioned and freely accessible?

Three people from very different eras – a philosopher from the pre-Christian Mediterranean basin, an industrialist from the nineteenth century, and a politician from a post-climate-change future – are plucked from their lives by a pair of bickering gods with dubious intent. Deposited in a vast encyclopaedic garden and granted access to all human knowledge, they are tasked with an extraordinary challenge: to design a world that can endure.

But as their grand experiment unfolds, they begin to discover that knowledge alone may not be enough.