The Guardian

A musical project honouring women killed by partners
March 2021

Songs for Murdered Sisters was co-commissioned by Houston Grand Opera and Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra. During the recording sessions, Heggie and Hopkins kept a photograph of Nathalie watching over them on a screen. Heggie envisaged the song cycle in the vein of Schubert’s Die Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) song cycle: “A wanderer trying to make sense of the world – grief-stricken and seeking transformation, connection, meaning, perhaps redemption … somewhere, somehow.”

“Margaret Atwood chose words that are singable, left places for musical interludes and where we could hear and see the singer transformed,” he says. “In the penultimate song, she left a question hanging in the air: ‘Would you instead forgive?’ That question of forgiveness opens a new possibility – a new light that breaks through.”