Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf's Adriana Mater plays the London Coliseum from 28 November to 12 December 2026.
Kaija Saariaho was born in Helsinki in 1952, studied in Freiburg and Paris, and worked at IRCAM on the electronics that changed how her music sounds — orchestral writing that behaves like light through water, 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, and she had written five operas at a time when almost nobody was writing operas that entered the repertoire.
Adriana Mater, from 2006, is the second of them, to a libretto by the novelist Amin Maalouf. A woman is raped by a soldier during a war, keeps the child, and raises him; the child grows up and goes looking for his father. The question the piece turns on is whether violence is inherited, and it declines to answer until the last scene.
English National Opera gives it at the London Coliseum from Saturday 28 November to Saturday 12 December 2026. It is one of four operas by living women in a nine-work season, six of them new productions — the most contemporary programming an English opera house has attempted in years, and the reason to take the house seriously this year. It has been staged rarely since Paris, which is the ordinary fate of a large new opera and the reason to take this one.