Solveig Sørbø
Norwegian composer Solveig Sørbø discusses Heroin Chic, a contemporary opera exploring addiction, identity, and existential struggles, revealing its musical inspirations, creative challenges, and vision for opera’s future.
1. Solveig, Heroin Chic is based on Maria Kjos Fonn’s novel and explores deeply challenging themes such as addiction, identity, sexuality, and death. What initially drew you to this story, and what made you feel that opera was the right medium to bring Elise’s psychological journey to life?
Thanks for having me! I think I just wanted to write an opera, and then the story presented itself as something that could be gloomy and grandiose enough to fit my musical ambition! Opera is a perfect format for showing grand emotions, conflict, ambiguity and the subconscious. The music says so much without words, and then there are the lyrics in addition, so every moment can carry a lot of information open for interpretation. Elise’s journey spans childhood, young love, self-absorption, intoxication, a death wish, and has eerie and religious undertones – all needing a musical match. This humbling task served as a catalyst for my musical development and expansion.
2. Elise is a fascinating and deeply conflicted character, caught between her mother’s idealized image of innocence and her own increasingly destructive search for identity and transcendence. How did you approach translating her inner struggles into music, and did you develop specific musical themes or textures to represent the different sides of her personality?
Yes, one aspect with her is this inner conflict, and another is her inexorable death drive. I played with different musical colours and themes to create her operatic presence. The singers also filled the role with their own interpretations. Sofia Neacsu is Elise as a child, her angelic voice speaks directly to the heart. And Susanna Wolff embodied adolescent and adult Elise with great power. The sheer size of the role mirrors Elise’s destructive self-centredness where everyone else becomes a side character. I also made glissandi represent addiction, and I unified the Elises and the core sentence (supplied by author-turned-librettist Maria Kjos Fonn) “Fair body and eternally dark mind” with a specific musical theme that they each sing – Elise when she wakes up from sleep and is suddenly a young adult, and Little Elise when Elise has fallen into eternal sleep and resurrected, or has brought everyone into her drug fantasy.
3. Your score combines contemporary classical music with influences from popular culture, unconventional instrumentation, hypnotic percussion, and a striking use of the cimbalom. What inspired these particular sonic choices, and how do they help create the unsettling emotional atmosphere of the opera?
I actually first selected some instruments that I really like such as bass drum, tam-tam, flute, harp and melodic percussion, and I also wanted to include the cimbalom since it is tied to Romania where the urpremiere was going to take place, and also since in a previous draft of the overdose aria I had used the related Persian instrument santoor – but as I kept working on the score things started to crystallise and I found more clear roles for the instruments. They have their unique timbres and capacities, and I really enjoyed getting both brainy and intuitive about how to create different colours and emotions. The amazing conductor, Hans Petter Mæhle gave me some great ideas in this respect too, for instance he showed me a lot of different playing techniques for strings which create very different effects.
4. Heroin Chic received an enthusiastic response at its Romanian premiere in 2025 before reaching a sold-out audience in Oslo in February 2026. Were you surprised by how audiences responded to such an intense and psychologically demanding work, and did those performances change your own relationship with the opera?
I think people love to be taken on an emotional rollercoaster without the risk of falling. That is a reason we go to the movies and the theatre. Still, I had never expected the warmth the work was received with. It is after all brand new contemporary music and a lot to take in. The only recognisable part is a play over Händel’s Lacia ch’io pianga at the end of the first act, which probably gives some joy of recognition, but the rest must be quite challenging at times, but hopefully engaging too. So I am very happy people really tuned into it and were able to relate to it! Regarding myself, I guess having a work performed is a crucial part of the creative process, because after each show I did a few adjustments. There is something very concrete and stimulating in having music manifested before an audience.
5. Just two days after the Norwegian premiere, you recorded the entire 90-minute opera live to tape at Jar Church in a single day. That sounds like an extraordinary challenge for everyone involved. Why did you choose this approach, and what do you feel the live recording captures that a more conventional studio production might have lost?
We had initially planned to just record about 20-25 minutes since that is a standard recording day which was all we could risk economically before having finances in order. But audio engineed Trond Kjelsås said that we should just power through and aim at getting it all down. Luckily all the performers were courageous enough to agree and so we did, and Trond captured the sound beautifully! I think this way of recording, where some parts are one-shot, and others with very few takes, retains the electrical immediacy of live music. There is no time for perfection, but the musical dramaturgy and the organic musicianship are gained, which makes it so much alive! Paired with the physical medium of vinyl – thanks to Audio-Technica – all is set for a really intimate / direct and real encounter with this modern opera.
6. The opera ends on a deliberately ambiguous note, leaving audiences questioning whether they have witnessed death, resurrection, or a drug-induced fantasy. What do you hope listeners will take away from Elise’s journey, and how would you like Heroin Chic to challenge people’s expectations of what contemporary opera can be?
I am not sure what they can take away from it as I am not trying to prove a point, but perhaps it can make people connect with ideas of existential numbness, complicated mother-daughter relations, and the desire for ones own legacy, for instance. And in terms of the genre, it would be really rad if this work could help people discover that opera is a genre for our time as well, and that it can host a lot of other genres and elements in it, as a true unified art. There is so much exciting happening in the world of opera, by the way, such as the works of Missy Mazzoli, Kaija Saariaho, and of course a bit older works by Benjamin Britten. Opera is not just The Magic Flute – although that is amazing too!