Great Operas Written in the 21st Century

Written in 2016, Angel’s Bone won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2017. It is written by Chinese-American composer Du Yun and Canadian librettist Royce Vavrek. Their opera is filled with several different musical genres as well as spoken word.

Angel’s Bone is about a couple facing financial crisis and a crumbling marriage. They discover two injured angels and intend to nurse them back to life. However, the couple then exploit the angels in search of fame and fortune. It’s an allegory for human trafficking in the modern world.

ENO will give this opera it’s UK premiere in 2026 at Aviva Studios in Manchester.

Powerful music by Jake Heggie and lyrics by award-winning playwright Terrence McNally combine in the opera Dead Man Walking. This is the most-performed of the operas on our list.

The opera is based on a best-selling memoir by Sister Helen Prejean, a American nun. Her book is about her work as a spiritual advisor to prisoners on Death Row.

The opera unfolds as Sister Helen meets a prisoner and his family; the families of the two murder victims, and the staff at the prison. Sister Helen wrestles with the challenges of friendship and forgiveness that her role as spiritual advisor has brought her.

The book is also the basis of the film of the same name starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn, the former winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1995.

Another opera based on a best-selling novel, The Handmaid’s Tale opera is based on the Margaret Atwood book of the same name. The opera was adapted by Danish composer Poul Ruders with the libretto by Paul Bentley.

The story follows Offred, a resilient woman in the dystopian Republic of Gilead. Stripped of her rights, she is one of many Handmaids forced to bear children for ruling Commanders. Her struggle against oppression and her defiance of the regime’s control are central themes within the opera’s plot.

ENO performed the UK premiere of the opera in 2003 at the London Coliseum.

Blue follows the story of a black middle-class Harlem-based family whose hopes for their teenage son are dashed when he is shot by a white police officer.

The opera references the abuse, jailing and murder of Black youth across the decades from the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955; to the police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 and the killing of unarmed black victims like Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd.

The opera was written in 2019 by Tony Award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori with a libretto by Tazewell Thompson. It is a drama that explores love and loss, church, sisterhood, and most importantly, family. Blue is about the issues facing the Black community in America in the 21st century.

ENO performed the UK premiere of Blue in 2023.

Doctor Atomic is an opera by John Adams about the scientist J Robert Oppenheimer. The opera is set in the final hours leading up to the first atomic bomb explosion at the New Mexico test site, in July 1945.

The libretto of Doctor Atomic was created by Peter Sellars. He drew on personal memoirs, recorded interviews, technical manuals of nuclear physics and declassified government documents, as well as the Bhagavad Gita and the poetry of John Donne, Charles Baudelaire and Muriel Rukeyser, an American poet and contemporary of Oppenheimer.

ENO performed the UK premiere in 2009.

Written by British composer Nico Muhly with librettist Nicholas Wright, this opera is based on the novel Marnie by Winston Graham, who then co-wrote the 1964 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Tippi Hedren.

Marnie makes her way through life by embezzling her employers before she moves on and changes her identity. When her current boss catches her red-handed, he blackmails her into a loveless marriage. Marnie is left with no choice but to confront the hidden trauma from her past.

ENO gave this opera it’s world premiere in 2017 at the London Coliseum.

Mark Anthony Turnage’s The Silver Tassie is based on a Sean O’Casey anti-war play with a libretto by Amanda Holden. The title refers to a trophy that lead character Harry Heegan wins before World War I.

The opera takes us through scenes of Harry’s life from Harry coming home on leave from the army through to his time in the trenches then how he lives after he returns home severely injured.

ENO commissioned the opera and gave its world premiere in 2000. The opera won the South Bank Show Award and Outstanding Achievement in Opera at the Olivier Awards.