“Cantus Firmus” brings four women together on stage as they seek ways to protect a local Latvian bog endangered by a female oligarch’s plans to develop a spa in the middle of it. Within a richly layered musical composition, their concerns intertwine with questions about how much agency an individual can - and should - take when faced with what they perceive as a threat to the common good of others. Together, the women go in depth, navigating the world that is coming to an end before their eyes, searching for a line between conscious risk and motives fueled by personal needs and ego.

Cantus Firmus is a fixed melody drawn from pre-existing chants or hymns, traditionally used as the foundation for polyphonic church music during the Medieval and Renaissance eras. Serving as a consistent musical backbone, it provided a stable basis upon which other vocal lines could be composed, creating elaborate and harmonious musical structures shaped by the strict rules of polyphonic writing - structures that often sound strikingly otherworldly to modern ears. Historically, such music was typically sung by male monks in monasteries, as women’s voices were largely excluded from public church liturgies, contributing to a male-dominated musical canon. And yet, behind convent walls - freed from the obligations of noble duties and arranged marriages - women composed and performed intricate polyphonic works of their own, drawing on sacred texts, plainchant, and deep personal devotion, weaving freedom into places of silence and seclusion.

“Cantus Firmus” is the second opera of a triptych made by Barbara Lehtna, Linda Krūmiņa, and Līva Blūma. Their first contemporary chamber opera, “Monstera Deliciosa” (2023), similarly explored themes of ecology, climate crisis, and women’s stories, and was nominated for two Latvian theatre awards - for Best Small-Scale Production and Best Musical Score (Līva Blūma).

Līva Blūma is a Latvian composer and singer who works at the intersection of concert music, opera, and performance art. She holds a Bachelor's degree in composition from Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music and a Master's degree in composition from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. Līva's creative impulses as a composer are found in poetry, the visual arts, medicine and nature, while her vocal works are based upon a variety of sources, ranging from 16th-century poets to spam emails and advertisements. Her process creates sound worlds that range from eerie and strange to vital and relentlessly rhythmic.