Photo Credit: Valeriya Landar/Opera aperta

The themes of environmentalism, conservation of natural resources, sustainability, and ecological welfare have become rife in contemporary discourse today due, unfortunately, to the increasingly unstable nature of Earth’s condition and the human race’s ongoing inability to regulate the actions of the apathetic. Composers of every age, capacity, and style have come forward during the centuries and recent decades to voice their view on the matter. From the 1950s on, the aforementioned themes have continued to gain a footing in the opera space, Britten’s ‘Noye’s Fludde‘ (1958) among the earliest. Later, Christopher Brown‘s ‘The Split Goose Feather‘ (1979) began a UK-based trend of community-based operas on environmental themes, the trend continuing with operas like Rachel Portmen’s ‘The Water Diviner’s Tale‘ (2022) and Noah Mosley’s ‘The Wish-Gatherer‘ (2023).’

To celebrate Earth Day, I wish to explore two recently premiered operas on environmental themes, and while there are too many to include in one article, I will list some at the end for you to discover on your own. In many respects, this environmental turn in opera is intimately associated with the wider ‘posthuman turn‘ in social discourse, where the human-nature relation is being interrogated with the awareness of the mutualities between each party. Operas like Stuart MacRae’s ‘Anthropocene‘ (2019) and projects like the Global Science Opera (GSO) forward the argument that the age of the human as the dominant force in the world is effectively over. As we become ever-more aware of how dependent humans are on Nature, we evolve, and it is this step which is contemporary opera’s next big venture. In this vein, let’s look at two of my most favorite recent operas that deal with a highly topical theme for today’s world, namely the human not as a leader but as a team player.

Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko: GAIA-24. Opera del mondo (2024)

Described as a “contemporary geohistorical opera,” Ukrainian composers Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko wrote the opera as a meditation on the symbiotic relations between the universe, nature, and humankind, with a serious look at how cultural and political contexts affect the relation. The work’s main theme, however, is the impact of the Russian invasion on Ukraine, specifically the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, and the ecological damage of Putin’s actions. It first premiered in Kyiv on May 10, 2024, at the International Center of Culture and Arts. Programmed by Opera aperta, the opera resembles less a traditional opera than a pastiche-like jukebox opera, featuring selections from both classical, folk, and non-classical music to tell its environmental story. Given the opera’s freshness, it remains to be seen what the future looks like for their opera, but it joins the list of similarly-themed operas like ‘The Mothers of Kherson‘ (2025) and Mykola Lysenko’s ‘Aeneid‘ (2025).

Jacinth Greywoode: White Raven, Black Dove (2025)

Commissioned by White Snake Projects, a Massachusetts-based company focused on giving voice to opera composers historically starved of a voice, Greywoode’s opera takes an intermedial approach to the discussion on two central issues in contemporary US culture, racial inequality and climate change. It premiered in September of 2025 and was, by all accounts, a rich affair, being full of multi-elemental theatrics and featuring a score of tasteful quotative moments. The plot centers around two birds after the Sixth Extinction, otherwise known as the Anthropocene extinction (i.e., the artificial, or human-fabricated, extinction of living things), who venture to collaborate and construct a healthier future. Taking full advantage of the technological innovations in opera during the past two to three decades, namely the use of computer imagery and animation, Greywoode’s also reflects the story’s existential battling through her deliberate meta-destruction of music history itself, with Neo-Classicism fighting classical Serialism and even European Romanticism fighting Western pop music.

Others Environmental Operas

1. Uljas Pulkkis: All the Truths We Cannot See (2020)
2. Elizabeth Clark: Seeds Under Nuclear Winter (2021)
3. Sivan Eldar: Like flesh (2022)
4. Sir David Pountney: Masque of Might (2023)
5. Ellen Reid: The Shell Trial (2024)
6. Beniamin Baczewski: Jezioro Popiołów (2025)
7. Cecilia Livingston and Duncan McFarlane: Parelios (2026)

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Not just composers but opera companies great and small have contributed to keeping environmentalism on the lips of society. In 2024, the New York City-based group, American Opera Projects, launched their initiative, ‘The Climate Opera Project,’ a collation of four operatic shorts on ecological themes. Other projects like the Environmental Opera Research Conference in 2022, held in Helsinki, Finland, discussed the growing need for infrastructural focus on sustainability and actionable steps to make contemporary opera more environmentally friendly given the vast amount of resources it requires. Further still are initiatives like ‘Project Butterfly‘ which “create a new attitude towards sustainability in theatre and opera houses by exploring new green practices related to opera production and circulation.” A ground-breaking achievement in this regard is Malmö Opera in Malmö, Sweden, whose opera house is the first sustainability-verified opera house in the entire world.

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