West Edge Opera has announced the commission of “The School for Girls Who Lost Everything in the Fire.”

The new opera by composer Ryan Suleiman and librettist Cristina Fríes will receive its world premiere at West Edge Opera’s Summer Festival 2029.

The work is set in a makeshift school run by nuns in the charred ruins of a California town and follows three teenage girls who find themselves under strict convent rule while a shadowy figure known as the Barn Man terrorizes their nights. When a secret romance between two of the girls is discovered, long-suppressed guilt rises to the surface.

“This opera contains all the ingredients for a mysterious, dramatic, multilayered operatic work: sex, love, death, mystery, intrigue, drama, suspense, religion, loss, tragedy, and even hints of the surreal and supernatural. Its setting in modern-day, fire-ravaged California speaks to the apocalyptic times we’re living in. In the opera, the, smoke is almost its own character, never letting us forget its presence, forcing us to breathe it in,” said Suleiman, Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music, per an official press release.

“Within the lives of teenage girls exists profound purity and wisdom, messiness and savagery, desire and love that still lives within our hearts as adults but in muted forms. I want to bring the raw humanity of teenage girls to the stage so that we can hear what they have to say about our shared humanity. At the heart of this opera is the devastating impact of repression, and the absolutely beautiful and dangerous power of a girl’s heart,” added Fries, who is a recipient of the 2026–27 Steinbeck Fellowship, the PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Tin House Scholarship.

West Edge Opera is based in the East Bay Area and presents an annual Summer Festival at the Oakland Scottish Rite Center.

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