Elena Langer is a prolific composer of colourful, dramatic and often humorous music, familiar to audiences across Europe and America through her operatic, vocal and orchestral pieces. Elena’s 2016 hit for Welsh National Opera, Figaro Gets a Divorce (receiving a new production at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm in 2026) was described by Rupert Christiansen in the Daily Telegraph as “that rare thing: a modern opera that exerts an immediate emotional impact”. Her WNO follow-up, the 2018 vaudeville Rhondda Rips It Up!, was wildly popular with audiences across the UK, The Times describing it as “bursting with irreverent joy”. Her recent cantata The Dong with a Luminous Nose was warmly reviewed in The Times: “Langer manages to uncover the sadness of lost love lurking beneath the poem’s whimsy”.

Her new opera To Die For [A Comedy] will be co-produced by the Netherlands Reisopera in Holland and Buxton International Festival in the UK in 2026. Based on the 1928 play The Suicide by Nikolai Erdman, it is an exuberant and subversive black farce whose message is that while life may be chaotic and cruel, lived amid absurdity and horror, the alternative is almost certainly worse. A new version of Elena’s comic opera Four Sisters (initially commissioned by Dawn Upshaw for Bard College) is to be performed at Covent Garden in spring 2026.

Elena Langer studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatoire in Moscow and at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her works have been performed at Zurich Opera, Carnegie Hall, the Grand Theatre Geneva, Opera National du Rhin, Strasbourg, Welsh National Opera, Shakespeare’s Globe, Hong Kong Academy of Arts, the Linbury Theatre at Covent Garden, the Tokyo Theatre and Boston Symphony Hall. 

Landscape with Three People, a CD of Elena’s vocal and chamber pieces, was released by Harmonia Mundi in 2016. Richard Morrison in The Times wrote: “She can do sardonic astringency but also evoke surreal otherworldliness or romantic yearning. It all depends on her chosen texts to which she responds in meticulous detail”. Landscape with Three People was performed in 2022 at the Oxford Lieder Festival.

The orchestral suite created from Figaro Gets a Divorce was premiered by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev, in 2020; subsequently, Anna Rakitina conducted it with the Boston Symphony and the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. There have been further performances by Gergely Madaras and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Sir Mark Elder with the Hallé Orchestra, and Nicholas McGegan with the Cleveland Orchestra, among others.

The Dong with a Luminous Nose, a setting of the Romantic nonsense-poem by Edward Lear for chorus, orchestra and cello, was co-commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestra. The LPO premiered the work under Andrey Boreyko at the Royal Festival Hall in March 2023, and in March 2024 Sir Mark Elder conducted the American premiere at Symphony Hall. In autumn 2024 the work was performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

The oboist Nicholas Daniel commissioned and premiered Elena’s Gluhwein Concerto with Deutsche Kammerakademie Neuss am Rhein in 2022, and a new song cycle, Love & Endings, for soprano, oboe and harpsichord, was performed by Nicholas, Anna Dennis and Mahan Esfahani in April 2023 at Aldeburgh.

Three new song cycles are going to be premiered in 2025: Nice Weather for Witches, for mezzo, piano and dancers, and Two Mandelstam Songs for tenor and piano, at the Oxford International Song Festival in October 2025; and Fabulous Beasts, to be performed by the counter-tenor Hugh Cutting at the Wigmore Hall in December 2025. Elena’s new piano solo piece, Seasons (based on Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, and performed alongside it), was commissioned by the London Piano Festival to celebrate its tenth anniversary in October 2025. A new trumpet concerto, The Day the Sun Came Round for Tea, will be performed by Ben Wright and Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston in autumn 2025. 

Her recent orchestral piece Leonora’s Dream will be performed in Stuttgart under the baton of Andrei Boreyko in May 2026. Elena is also working on a new large orchestral piece for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, to be premiered in March 2026, and on a new violin concerto for Julian Rachlin and Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg, to premiere in 2027.