In advance of Opera America’s 2025 Opera Conference in Nashville, Wise Music Classical is pleased to present new highlights from our opera catalog. In these works, our composers and their collaborators treat fascinating historical figures (Hildegard; El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego; Mary, Queen of Scots), sensitively address contemporary issues (Innocence), and sketch rich psychological drama in sound.

Listen to these operas (where available) and other vocal music by these artists:

Upcoming premieres

Hildegard, Sarah Kirkland Snider

Sarah Kirkland Snider’s debut opera is centered on Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century abbess, mystic, saint, and composer renowned both for her sacred monophony and contributions to fields as diverse as theology, botany, and medicine. Snider’s narrative focuses on the emergent relationship between Hildegard and the young Richardis von Stade, a nun who served as Hildegard’s advisor and aided in the compilation of the visionary collection Scivias. Co-commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and Aspen Music Festival, Hildegard will have its world premiere at LA Opera this November 2025. With Snider’s “rapturous” music (The New York Times), stage direction by Elkhanah Pulitzer (known for what The Guardian has called her “handsome and efficient” staging), and projection design by Deborah Johnson, Hildegard is sure to be a vivid sonic and visual experience.

New productions

El último sueño de Frida y Diego, Gabriela Lena Frank/Nilo Cruz

El último sueño de Frida y Diego is a “magical-realist portrait of Mexico’s painterly power couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.” Written to a Spanish libretto by Frank’s long-time collaborator (and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright) Nilo Cruz, El último sueño inverts the Orfeo myth, with Kahlo returning from the underworld to aid Rivera as his own life concludes. Commissioned by San Diego Opera, San Francisco Opera, Fort Worth Opera, and DePauw University, the work is quickly becoming a contemporary classic, with recent performances at LA Opera and Opera Omaha following on the premiere runs by San Francisco and San Diego. Frank’s “confident, richly imagined score” (The New Yorker) now comes to Lyric Opera of Chicago in March-April 2026 and makes its debut at The Metropolitan Opera in a new production two months later. At The Met, Isabel Leonard, Carlos Álvarez, and Gabriella Reyes will perform under the batons of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Steven Osgood in a production by Deborah Colker.

Innocence, Kaija Saariaho/Sofi Oksanen (with multilingual libretto by Aleksi Barrière)

Kaija Saariaho’s final opera is “a monumental achievement” that “shows how essential opera can be” (The Guardian). Set in the early 2000s in Helsinki, Innocence deals with the aftermath of a shooting at an international school. Each of the school students speaks and/or sings in their own language, with especially moving lines delivered by the murdered Markéta, cast as a folk singer performing in Czech. The Times Literary Supplement writes that “Saariaho and Oksanen have a masterpiece on their hands […] the psychology and phenomenology of the opera feel so acutely contemporary that the listener becomes inexorably drawn into and implicated in the world of the tragedy.” Jointly commissioned by the Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence, Dutch National Opera, Finnish National Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, and San Francisco Opera, Innocence had its US premiere in San Francisco in June 2024 and will enjoy a new production for its debut at The Metropolitan Opera in April 2026. With Simon Stone directing, long-time Saariaho advocate Susanna Mälkki on the podium, and a star-studded cast including Joyce DiDonato, New York audiences can look forward to a brilliant presentation of this moving work.

Mary, Queen of Scots, Thea Musgrave

Mary, Queen of Scots premiered in 1977, but its tale of a strong and astute queen who is nonetheless challenged by the political intrigue, restrictive social norms, and treachery swirling around her is as relevant as ever. Indeed, English National Opera and San Francisco Opera’s new co-production makes this relevance explicit through a modern re-telling of the narrative which “reimagines the piece in terms of 20th-century sectarianism” (The Guardian). ENO’s February 2025 performances were “sung and acted with blazing conviction,” and San Francisco audiences can look forward to a similarly electric experience when the co-production of Musgrave’s “thrilling score […] rooted in the rough-hewn, elemental Scotland of Elizabethan times” comes stateside in future seasons.