Innocent
Eyes
a workshop presentation of a Catapult Opera commission
music and text by DAVID HERTZBERG
DATES & TICKET INFO
Tickets go on sale HERE on October 15, 2026 for BAM members and November 5, 2026 for General Public.
LISTEN TO DAVID HERTZBERG’S MUSIC
THE WAKE WORLD, performed at The Barnes Foundation in September 2017, featuring Maeve Höglund and Rihab Chaieb. Composed by David Hertzberg and directed by R.B. Schlather. From Opera Philadelphia.
THE STORY
Nearly 50 years after her passing, Joan Crawford is still a fascinating, polarizing figure: the rags-to-riches Hollywood heroine; the shrewd entrepreneur and Pepsi bigwig; the camp goddess; the Mommy Dearest monster. She remains a character of operatic proportions—and now, Catapult Opera seizes the opportunity to examine the life of an icon with Innocent Eyes, a new chamber opera by David Hertzberg that comes to BAM in an exclusive first-peek presentation. This closes out a week of workshopping at the Brown Arts Institute in Providence, Rhode Island.
Hertzberg, no stranger to obsessive and fantastical tales, is best known for his critically acclaimed, successful chamber operas The Rose Elf and The Wake World (named Best New Opera of 2017 by the Music Critics Association of North America). Innocent Eyes, set between Crawford’s reign as queen of MGM and her historic comeback in Mildred Pierce, spins the uncanny tale of a strange, enchanted dinner party after which nothing was ever the same. This performance is the establishing shot of what’s certain to be a buzzed-about creation.
THE COMPOSER
Described as "utterly original” by The New York Times and named a 2023 Musician to Watch by The Washington Post, David Hertzberg is a composer from Los Angeles.
In the spring of 2020, the debut recording of his opera, The Wake World, was released on Tzadik. Lauded as “a rapturous nirvana” by the Financial Times and “astonishingly imaginative” by the BBC, the recording was included among The New York Times’ Best Classical Albums of 2020. This was followed shortly by the release of his chamber opera, The Rose Elf, in the fall. Opera News named it one of the Best Recordings of the Year, calling it “a kaleidoscopic, narcotic vision” that The New Yorker wrote “blooms with warmth and depth”. That year he was awarded the Andrew Imbrie Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters and named a Guggenheim fellow.
The fall of 2017 saw the premiere of The Wake World, co-presented by Opera Philadelphia and the Barnes Foundation, which won the Music Critics Association of North America’s Best New Opera Award. The New York Times said of the premiere, “The score, spiked with modernist elements, makes Mr. Hertzberg seem a 21st-century Ravel.” and The Wall Street Journal noted “the sheen and muscle of Strauss wedded to the diaphanous spirit of Debussy, but with a distinctly modern edge”. In the spring of 2018, his opera The Rose Elf premiered in the catacombs of Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. WQXR named it The Opera Event of 2018, saying: “Hertzberg is a masterful dramatist: this one signals the arrival of a major compositional personality.”
In July 2026, Hertzberg published Grand Hotel. Recent work includes the iterative and ongoing series HVAC, as well as a forthcoming monodrama HQ.
Hertzberg served as Composer in Residence for Opera Philadelphia from 2015-2018, and for Young Concert Artists from 2012-2015. In recent seasons he has been a resident at Dumbarton Oaks, Yaddo, and the Lopud Foundation. His orchestral and chamber work has been performed at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and Carnegie Hall, and he has received distinctions from from Macdowell, Tanglewood, Copland House, BMI, ASCAP, and the International Opera Awards, which shortlisted him for Newcomer of the Year in 2018. He studied at Juilliard and Curtis.