Kaija Saariaho, ranked the greatest living composer in a critics' poll at her death, has her opera Adriana Mater staged by English National Opera this winter.
English National Opera stages Adriana Mater, the second opera by Kaija Saariaho, at the London Coliseum in Covent Garden from Saturday 28 November 2026.
Saariaho was born in Helsinki in 1952 and studied in Freiburg and Paris. At IRCAM she worked on the electronics that shaped her sound: slow shifts of colour where another composer would put a tune.
She died in Paris in 2023, by which point a poll of critics had ranked her the greatest living composer. She wrote five operas.
Adriana Mater dates from 2006 and sets a libretto by the novelist Amin Maalouf. A woman is raped by a soldier during a war, keeps the child and raises him. The son grows up and goes looking for his father, and the opera asks whether violence is inherited, holding back its answer until the last scene.
The work has been staged rarely since Paris, the usual fate of a large new opera. English National Opera gives it until Saturday 12 December 2026, as part of a season of nine works, six of them new productions.