Hedda Gabler (2025)

The mystery at the heart of Hedda Gabler is that we never truly know who she is—a complex, incoherent being navigating social norms, private aspiration, and quiet desperation; a sort of beautiful, dangerous dark star, drawing all matter towards her.

The idea of sculpting Hedda—and those around her—through music is as daunting as is compelling: every character is layered, no one is innocent, and yet it would be unfair to call any of them monstrous. Perhaps with one exception.

Ibsen’s dramaturgical clarity, economy, and clockwork precision expose tension knots that remain as relevant today as in 1891—social ones (how much agency does a woman really have?) and existential ones (how to survive colossal personal failure?). The play’s wedge-shaped structure—each act shorter than the last—traces a kind of slow, unstoppable spiral that takes us in just two days from bourgeois boredom to profound desperation. Capturing that slope, and the slow, relentless fall of everyone on it, is a thrilling and formidable task for a composer.