I don’t think I made it through a single rehearsal or performance of Jonathan Dove’s Uprising without tearing up or outright crying. It was a community opera on the topic of climate change, co-commissioned by Saffron Hall and Glyndebourne, initiated by Jim and Hilary Potter. Three versions premiered during the month of March 2025 in Glyndebourne, Saffron Hall, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. Each performance had professional orchestras and soloists, with local community adult and youth choruses. I had the great luck and privilege of being in the community adult chorus for Saffron Hall.
The opera follows Lola, a 15-year-old who goes on a climate strike. Initially, she must endure the taunts of her fellow students, but they eventually join her cause. The strike causes tensions in her family, but her sister and father eventually come to support her climate activism. During all of this, her mother wins a contract to tear down the local forest to build a highway. Shortly after the forest is destroyed, the local river floods. The opera ends with Lola working with other activists to regenerate the land. They invite her mother to join them. Their invitation hangs unanswered as the opera ends.
As we were first learning the music, my tears were around futility, desperation, and hopelessness. In Act 2, the adult chorus plays the trees of the forest. We musically bring the forest alive. We are regal, ancient, and slow. But we must plead for our survival. We sing, “Save us! Save us!” over and over, getting higher and louder, with increasing desperation and urgency. Lola and the students come and form a blockade: “The forest is history – and when it’s gone, it’s gone forever, from a thousand years to never!” But how could any of us ever hope to win against the momentum and inevitability of progress? The trees are cut. Our singing limps to a quiet and dead silence. “Goodbye, goodbye, this is how a thousand creatures die.” There is something in the powerlessness of having no say over your own future, of being at the mercy of others who, in the end, are also powerless.
The opera is an apology to the next generation. It is also a passing of the torch, empowering them to carry on the fight. Act 1 closes with musical chaos as everyone is singing over each other. Accompanied by a drumming group (also made up of young people), the youth chorus are unified in their climate strike, singing: “If you won’t change, move out of the way! Let this be our day! This is our time: this is happening now! And if we don’t stand up, if we don’t answer its call, then who will?”
Lola’s father sings in awe of how the youth follow Lola, of his pride in her courage to stand alone: “Didn’t everything that ever changed mean that someone had to stand apart, to take the scorn, the punishment, the pain. That’s what history tells us. And what’s to say that’s not our daughter?” The youth choir in the opera came a long way, from their first timid rehearsal to fully owning the climate strike and the blockade. Theirs was a beautiful transformation to witness. And it carries new meaning in light of the police raid on the Westminster Meeting House and the initiatives of Youth Demand — real-life examples of this fictionalised activism. How many of us would have the courage to stand apart to be the catalyst for others’ action?
By the time we were performing, my tears had shifted from futility to something closer to (dare I say) hope. The older generations in the opera are stuck in the system, blind to any possibilities of radical change, unable to imagine new ways of doing or being… they’re ultimately just trying to get by. The youth have not yet been fully indoctrinated into the system: they are still free to choose something different. “It’s time to awake. There are two roads: one leads to disaster […] the other to whatever we dream.” I wonder what that dream could look like…
Catherine Tylke