Elena Langer's To Die For [A Comedy] is given at the London Coliseum for one night on Sunday 29 November 2026 by Nederlandse Reisopera.
Elena Langer was born in Moscow, trained there and at the Royal College of Music, and has lived in London for most of her career. She writes fluently and unfashionably, with melody, rhythm and a sense of the stage, and her Figaro Gets a Divorce, which imagined Mozart’s characters twenty years on and in flight from a dictatorship, established her as one of the few composers writing operas that houses actually programme twice.
To Die For [A Comedy] is newer and, as the bracket suggests, playing with what an audience expects the word tragedy to be doing in an opera house. Langer has written for Welsh National Opera and the Royal Opera and works often with the librettist David Pountney, and the writing sits deliberately outside the academic modernism her generation was trained in.
It is given at the London Coliseum on Sunday 29 November 2026, and it is not an English National Opera production: the house is hosting Nederlandse Reisopera and the Phion Symphony Orchestra, the touring opera company and orchestra of the eastern Netherlands. One performance is the whole engagement, which is unusual for the Coliseum and means the date is the only decision to make. It falls the night after Adriana Mater opens, so the house carries two contemporary operas on consecutive evenings — a thing the Coliseum has not done in years.