Tears and catharsis as Kyiv premieres opera about Ukrainian children abducted by Russia

First lady and affected families in audience for highly charged performance of excerpts of Mothers of Kherson

It was hard to imagine an opera with a subject more potentially traumatic – or cathartic – for the assembled audience. The occasion, in the grand and gilded spaces of the National Opera of Ukraine, in Kyiv, was the premiere of excerpts of Mothers of Kherson, an opera about the abduction of Ukrainian children by Russian occupiers – a continuing, raw story of real-life loss and agony.

The opera was originally intended to be about the Maidan protests of 2013-14. But the American librettist George Brant, the author of the hit play Grounded, switched course in 2023 when the stories of abducted children hit the news.