From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Ascending Heart (Lyric Drama)
This article concerns a 2015 Australian opera adaptation. For the source material, see the three injuries – and the three temptations, the wings, and Fatherhood, birth and the caught descent.
The Ascending Heart is a 2015 Australian lyric drama composed by composer with libretto by librettist , exploring the erotic and caregiving intimacy between Leif and Katita, structured around the three injuries and their temptations.
Acts unfold across the three sites of bodily vulnerability: the bandaged eyes (mystery, faith); the immobile legs (the pinnacle, the fall); the pacemaker's rhythm (authority, surrender). Rather than resolving the temptations, the opera stages them as perpetually recurring—each act ending where it began, the loop itself becoming the true subject.
The score incorporates spinal frequencies, the oud as an instrument of longing, and prepared piano evoking both Kármán resonance and the mechanical pacemaker's pulse. The libretto is spare, repetitive, incantatory—much sung text concerns the body: its exposure, its trust, its capacity to desire and to be desired within the cycle.
A central sequence stages the cabin scene—the conversation about making a baby—as a duet of escalating vulnerability where the soprano's soaring lines are repeatedly grounded by the baritone's lower register, creating a harmonic tension that never resolves into pure consonance. The final act presents emergence of wings as both triumph and catastrophe, the fall reimagined as a kind of birth.
Premiered at Newcastle Conservatorium of Music and subsequently performed at Australian and international venues, the opera has been praised for its engagement with erotics and care ethics through operatic form.