Divine Feminine: creating a brand-new opera
Bringing together an extraordinary group of contemporary creatives, the BBC Singers will present Divine Feminine, a bold new opera by boundary-pushing composer Shiva Feshareki, this March. Featuring an original libretto by award-winning poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, and performed by the upper voices of the BBC Singers alongside members of Vox Next Gen, the live premiere will take place at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Thursday 5 March 2026, ahead of its national broadcast on Saturday 7 March on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sounds.
The opera’s origins lie in a conversation three years ago, when BBC Singers soprano Emma Tring invited Feshareki to collaborate on a new, holistic approach to opera-making, one rooted in the energy, symbolism, and intuition of the divine feminine. Together with choreographer Rebecca Namgauds and poet Karen McCarthy Woolf, the core creative team have shaped the work through shared ritual practices – using divine feminine oracle cards and chance-based processes, they allowed archetypes, narratives and energies to surface intuitively in their opera.
Here we hear from Emma Tring, Karen McCarthy Woolf & Shiva Feshareki, sharing how the opera came together from their own perspectives.
Emma Tring - soprano & creative production
I’ve been a soprano in the BBC Singers for 18 years and overtime the urge to create something for my own voice has been getting stronger.
I wanted to use my voice to explore the Divine Feminine – through music and movement – with the help of the Goddesses who had started calling to me.
During this time, I spent many quiet moments with Divine Feminine Oracle cards. I kept drawing the Cosmic Egg, with its message: ‘I hold the universe within me; I am the force of an ever-expanding love.’
Brigid, the ancient Irish goddess, also appeared to me again and again. Through my cards and my Kundalini yoga practice I found myself being led to Solas Bhride in Kildare during the summer solstice of 2025, Brigid’s homeland and the centre of a pilgrimage in her honour. I stayed there with composer Shiva Feshareki at Brigid’s spiritual centre, run by the Brigidine Sisters, a place open to people of all faiths and none.
Together we sat in Brigid’s fire temple, dipped our toes into her sacred well, and listened to old Irish folk music in the Curragh and in St Brigid’s Cathedral, built on the site of the monastery she founded around 480 AD. Throughout our journey we carried her sacred flame in an old metal lantern.
While in the temple, Shiva also felt a powerful connection to her own Iranian heritage and family. In Yazd, Iran, an eternal flame has burned in a sacred fire temple for more than 2,000 years, and the resonances between ancient Iran and Ireland were striking. The flame, Brigid, and the Persian goddess Anahita became central symbols within the opera.
As Shiva and I were debating whether to use existing texts or commission a new libretto for the opera, the poet Karen McCarthy Woolf sprung to mind. I had met her previously on a yoga retreat, and we had spoken about possibly collaborating on a project together. Her message arrived at the perfect moment, and I instantly knew she was the one to bring the voices of the Goddesses to life in our opera.
I knew that I wanted to have Lucy Goddard as our conductor for the project too. Having worked with her as a singer in Exaudi for many years, I have been really excited to experience her work as a conductor and music director on this project.
Karen McCarthy Woolf – librettist
This opera is a project very close to my heart. My mum brought me and my sisters up in a pantheist, intersectional feminist, pagan tradition. We were always encouraged to question and resist patriarchal structures.
In literature, gods and goddesses are found from all around the world. In a contemporary sense they reappear as superheroes, with special powers and strengths. I think goddess stories also give women access to the hero narrative: we are at the centre of the story, with power and agency in the world.
Brigid is a pre-Christian goddess of fire, healing, poetry and beer! In Celtic mythology it's Brigid's job to bring forth spring every year with the first flowers, the snowdrop. In the libretto, we find her exhausted as it's getting harder to evoke fresh life and growth each season as the natural world is traumatized by extractive capitalism. So with the help of Anahita, the ancient Iranian goddess of water, rivers and fertility, and her West African/Brazilian counterpart Yemaya, a mermaid goddess of the sea, alongside Snowdrop, a teenage mortal, the goddesses band together to help rekindle Brigid's dwindling sacred flame and save planet Earth.
For the libretto I used a variety of poetic forms. Brigid's Ballad is a traditional rhyming ballad written in stress metre, which tells of her time in winter – where she serves beer to warriors, to men in the pub and stokes the hearth of her sacred flame that must be kept alight so new flowers can emerge from its warmth. It's a song of the taverns, and a song of resistance. I also wrote sections in landays – an ancient and often anonymous Afghan women's form, written in couplets, traditionally sung. Other sections are written in ghazals – a Persian lyric form, with a refrain that again was often recited and sung in a tradition of call and response. The rest of the opera is written in 3, 6, 9 syllabic lines, which connects to the 3, 6, 9 harmonies that Shiva Feshareki used in the composition.
For me the opera is more than entertainment: it's an opportunity to reach out and ask for spiritual assistance. The planetary ecosystems are at breaking point. And we need all the help we can get.
Shiva Feshareki – composer & turntables/electronics
Divine Feminine blends trance, poetry, live spatial electronics, turntablism and physical movement. In drawing on the duplexities of Goddess traditions, and ancient vocal practices from around the world, Divine Feminine becomes an act of remembering humanity’s deep relationship with nature and the cosmos. Its harmonic language is microtonal, rooted in the natural harmonic series and ancient tuning systems that mirror the birational patterns of the natural world. At the core of the work is what I call a Divine Frequency: a constellation of microtonal harmonic structures that forms the opera’s underlying sonic universe.
The opera is presented in a fully immersive, 360° soundscape: singers are spread out both on stage and within the audience, often moving through the venue, while the flautist occupies shifting vantage points, including the elevated gallery positions. My spatial design follows the principles of sacred geometry and the golden ratio, where voices are projected at precise angles so that sound appears to spiral, expand and converge. The cumulative effect is the sensation of ‘divine spirals’ of sound.
Its narrative and characters emerge through live vocal and poetic performance, which are then fractured, echoed and transformed via the turntables and live electronics. The voices captured on vinyl and transformed and transformed in performance include those of my mother and niece, Emma’s mother, and the creators themselves.
With its deep bass architecture, rotating textures, and shape-shifting sonic forms, Divine Feminine is not an opera you simply watch or listen to. It is a radical sonic environment: one you step inside, surrender to, and allow to move through you.
