![Production photograph of To Die For [A Comedy]: a crowded cast in bright costumes gathers around a man in striped pyjamas slumped in an armchair, in a room papered with red roses](https://img.litme.events/unsafe/rs:fill:640:640:0/g:sm/q:82/plain/https://media.litme.events/london-events/to-die-for-a-comedy-2026/to-die-for-a-comedy-covent-garden.jpg@webp)
Elena Langer, one of the few opera composers whose work houses actually programme twice, has her To Die For [A Comedy] given at the London Coliseum this winter.
Elena Langer, the Moscow-born composer of Figaro Gets a Divorce, sees To Die For [A Comedy] staged at the London Coliseum in Covent Garden on Sunday 29 November 2026. The opera has a single performance.
Langer trained in Moscow and at the Royal College of Music, and has lived in London for most of her career.
Figaro Gets a Divorce imagined Mozart’s characters twenty years on, in flight from a dictatorship. It established her as one of the few composers whose operas houses programme twice. She has written for Welsh National Opera and the Royal Opera, and works often with the librettist David Pountney.
To Die For [A Comedy] is a newer work. As the bracket in its title suggests, it plays with what an audience expects the word tragedy to be doing in an opera house.
Nederlandse Reisopera and the Phion Symphony Orchestra, the touring company and orchestra of the eastern Netherlands, give the performance in place of English National Opera. It falls the night after Adriana Mater opens, so the Coliseum carries two contemporary operas on consecutive evenings.