“Cantus Firmus” brings four women together on stage as they seek ways to stop an oligarch’s plan to build a spa in the middle of an endangered Latvian bog. Soon enough, we learn that they have already blown up a bridge and are discussing how to proceed next — and whether the risks they’re willing to take are justified for what they perceive as the common good. The women go in depth, trying to navigate a world that is coming to an end before their eyes, while figuring out how to place their bodies between danger and what they love.

The musical score is inspired by cantus firmus, a compositional tool used for writing most of the church music in the Medieval and Renaissance eras. Such music was mostly performed by men, as women’s voices were largely excluded from public church liturgies. And yet, behind convent walls, freed from the obligations of noble duties and arranged marriage, women sang and composed intricate polyphonic music weaving freedom in 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.