Content warning: blood, gun violence, murder

Pedro Carmona, a young surgeon and son of a prominent Portuguese general, has escaped military service in Angola in 1968 by fleeing to Toronto with his upper-class wife Constanza. In order to survive, he has taken two jobs while he retrains to qualify as a doctor. The opera begins as Constanza—sick of poverty, loneliness, and winter—explodes in frustration. She humiliates Pedro by threatening to get a job herself. Pedro storms out, and ends up at a Fado club, where he meets the Fadista Inês. He becomes a regular at the club, and love grows between him and Inês. In Lisbon, Pedro’s anxious parents haven’t heard from him for months. A telegram from the dictator Salazar informs them of Pedro’s desertion, ordering him to be captured and shot. Pedro can resist Inês no longer: he goes to her apartment, and they consummate their love. Constanza, who has taken a job as a cleaner, discovers Pedro’s photograph in Inês’s dressing room, and confronts him. Inês arrives and tells them that she is carrying Pedro’s child. Constanza is crushed and begs for Pedro to come back, but he refuses, moving in with Inês instead. Summoned by Constanza, Pedro’s parents confront him, accuse him of harming the family’s name, and order him to return to his wife; again he refuses. Alone with his son, General Carmona tries some gentler persuasion, but to no avail. His wife decides that the only honourable solution is for the General to kill Inês; when he hesitates, she takes his gun, goes to the nightclub, and shoots Inês. Constanza is appalled by the murder. The General hears from Pedro, who discovered Inês’s body while on duty at the morgue, and asks to meet his parents and wife at the cathedral, in order to repent his sins before them and before God. He does so, but then he takes the General’s gun and forces the others to drink Inês’s blood, a vessel of which he has saved from the morgue. He unveils her dead body, and forces the others to sing her praises. He shoots himself, whereupon Inês sings a final farewell.

- from CMC Composer Showcase