Why Composers Want to Write Operas for Children

A lonely schoolboy named Bertil makes a magical friend who goes by Nils in “Nils Karlsson Däumling,” a children’s opera by Thierry Tidrow based on a fairy tale by Astrid Lindgren. Nils teaches Bertil to change his size by singing a spell-like song.

For contemporary classical composers, writing children’s opera can be similarly transfiguring — it’s like casting a spell that lets them be both big and small. Artists with highly experimental aesthetics get to embrace their silly sides and reconnect with the childlike urge to create.

In their work, and especially in opera, composers often feel an “immense pressure,” Tidrow said in an interview, “to show that you’re being original, that you know everything else that has been done, and that what you’re doing is apart from that.”

Writing for children, by comparison, can be liberating. As Tidrow often says, “They haven’t read Adorno.”

“Nils Karlsson Däumling,” an unusually mobile children’s opera, is scored for a soprano and a speaking violinist, and can be performed on a set that fits in a van. Partly for that reason, it has been performed more than 300 times since its premiere in 2019. But more sprawling children’s operas are also a regular feature of musical life in Europe. Vienna leads the way: In December, the Vienna State Opera opened a second venue, the Neue Staatsoper — known by its contracted name, the Nest — dedicated entirely to opera productions for children, families and young adults.

“It can be stressful being a living composer,” Bogdan Roscic, the State Opera’s general director, said in a phone interview. “And writing for children actually is very liberating, I think, simply because one can discover his inner child.”