15 Operas by Female Composers
Here are some operas to check out by contemporary female composers, including four that you can book tickets to go and see in the next few months, and a couple that you can watch on YouTube. To find out about upcoming concerts in the UK that include music by female composers, visit this page.
Lisa Logan (2026)
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, the opera traces one voice finding its power. At its heart, a refrain: “I am one voice. I was never meant to be the only one.” Urgent, poetic, and deeply human.
Book tickets for a live performance in London this summer (15-18 July 2026) as part of Grimeborn Opera Festival >> (ad)
Bitter Visions: By Order of Hildegard
Hildegard von Bingen and Florence Carruthers Andrews (2026)
Bitter Visions follows the demise of a Soul, who is led astray from her fellow Virtues by the Devil. Through the familiar path of fall and redemption, Ololyga re-examine notions of feminine virtue and desire, whilst confronting ongoing debates around sexual agency and bodily autonomy.
Missy Mazzoli (2026)
Resetting Kafka’s short story A Country Doctor in the present-day opioid crisis, a charming man comes to a small town, peddling a magical cure for pain in the form of a carousel ride. Doctor Theresa Hart initially endorses the cure after seeing the transformational effect on her town, realizing only too late that there are no easy solutions to complex problems.
The world premiere performance in Edinburgh (9-12 August 2026)
Kaija Saariaho (2005)
Listen on Spotify
The setting is a country at war in the present day. Adriana is raped by Tsargo and falls pregnant. She has a son - Yonas - and raises him, tormented by whether his behaviour will be determined by the blood of his father or by herself. When Yonas learns the truth of his conception, he vows to kill his father.
Live performance by ENO in London (28 November - 12 December 2026)
Du Yun (2015)
Listen on Spotify
Angel's Bone follows the plight of two angels whose nostalgia for earthly delights has, mysteriously, brought them back to our world. They are found battered and bruised from their long journey by a man and his wife. Mr and Mrs X.E. set out to nurse the wounded angels back to health.
Nwando Ebizie (2026)
Ecstasy of the Virtues is a multisensory operatic performance inspired by Nwando Ebizie's exploration of the life of Hildegard von Bingen, viewed from Nwando's perspective as a Neurodivergent Afrofuturist. Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), Benedictine abbess, composer, visual artist, writer and mystic; not only a visionary, but also, uniquely for the time, a woman whose visions were recorded and preserved in musical scores, writings and illuminated manuscripts‚ lives again in new form.
Ecstasy of the Virtues will be premiering in the UK later this year
Missy Mazzoli (2016)
Watch on YouTube (dress rehearsal)
Receiving its UK premiere in June 2026, Proving Up is an opera about the American Dream, told through the story of Nebraska homesteaders in the 1870s. A family dreams of "proving up" and obtaining the deed to the land they've settled. They obsessively list the requirements of the Homestead Act: five years of harvest, a sod house dwelling, and perhaps the most elusive element - a glass window.
Unsuk Chin (2007)
Watch on YouTube
Alice opens a book in the library, which thereupon turns into a treasure chamber. She meets a boy, whose fate is to carry a mummified cat, and two old men whom she asks in vain to flee before the door to the treasure chamber closes.
Jeanine Tesori (2016)
Watch on YouTube
In Harlem, a couple celebrates the birth of their firstborn - a boy, Black and beautiful. As the mother worries for their son’s future in today’s America, the father wrestles with his role as a police officer, a “Black man in blue.” When the unimaginable happens and the son is killed by a white officer, they must face every family’s worst fear.
Dani Howard (2023)
The Yellow Wallpaper adorns the walls of the room in which a young woman undergoes an involuntary “rest” cure following a postpartum depression. The story of the obsession of this woman forced into isolation with the wallpaper’s unattractive colour and patterns carries an urgent message about social structures discriminatory to women.
Judith Weir (1987)
Chao Sun leaves his city of Loyan for exile. His son Chao Lin is charged with the construction of a canal and the night before departure, they enact The Chao Family Orphan. General Tu-an-Ku provokes the suicide of his servant Chao and his wife, leaving their son an orphan but unwittingly, the General adopts and raises the child. Twenty years later, they conspire to overthrow the emperor.
Paula Kimper (1998)
Watch on YouTube
Patience and Sarah is widely considered the first lesbian opera and the first mainstream gay-themed opera. Set in Connecticut, 1816, it follows Patience White, the sister of the middle-class landowner, and Sarah, a poor farmer, as they dream of leaving their repressive lives to go pioneering together.
Alma Deutscher (2016)
Watch on YouTube
Written when Deutscher was 12 years old, her adaptation follows Cinderella as a composer, slave worked as a copyist by her step-mother, who runs an opera house. Once Cinderella flees from the ball, the prince will search for her not with the aid of a glass slipper but with the beginning of the melody, which only she knows how to continue.
Thea Musgrave (1977)
Mary, Catholic Queen of Scotland, has been invited by the Protestant Lords to return and assume the Scottish crown. Concentrating on her half-brother, James Stewart, Mary’s personality is expressed through the different situations in which she finds herself. In each, she vies with the other to win the favour of both the Lords and the people so to have ultimate power and control.
Cheryl Frances-Hoad (2012)
Watch on YouTube (excerpt)
Amy Johnson, the girl from Hull, paved the way for women today. She flew around the world, took huge risks and made history. In 1958, the 'Amy Johnson Collection' of souvenirs was presented by her father to Sewerby Hall, Bridlington providing the inspiration for Amy’s Last Dive, especially her monogrammed pigskin bag which survived her fatal crash into the Thames Estuary in 1941. Her body was never recovered.
Hannah Fiddy is the Founder of Alternative Classical and a freelance marketing consultant, developing audiences for classical music. Described as a "classical innovator" by Classical Whisper, Hannah has created and promoted numerous concerts outside of traditional spaces, including warehouses, pubs, clubs and museums; interviewed some of the world's most famous composers; and guest lectured on innovation in the classical music industry. Hannah has managed the digital marketing for many music organisations and artists including choral composer John Rutter and The King’s Singers. In a past life she founded London Flashmob, producing quirky events from wedding proposals to cultural pranks for up to 1,000 people.
