On Saturday 25 March, 1911, Greenwich Village’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory caught fire. One hundred and forty-six garment workers – mostly recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women – died, many prevented from escaping the flames by stairwells and exits locked by the management.
The disaster is the catalyst for Pulitzer-winning composer Julia Wolfe’s 2019 multimedia oratorio Fire in My Mouth: the third in her series of large-scale works drawing on the history of the American worker, and a punchy opener to the Southbank Centre’s autumn season.
This isn’t the first protest-work we’ve seen from Wolfe in London this year; 2026 opened with unEarth at the Barbican – an earnest homily on the climate emergency. But where the latter preached, Fire in My Mouth dramatises. Succinct and direct, told largely in verbatim words from survivors and contemporaries, the piece’s strength is its refusal to widen the lens, to turn a tragedy into a touchstone or individuals into everywomen.
The score churns and whirs with kinetic energy: the clack of the sewing machines or the swell of the ocean we first meet the women crossing “without passports or anything”. Text is fragmented and superimposed, layered in motoric patterns until consonants become verbal pistons and levers. Underneath, a large orchestra (here a keenly expressive Philharmonia conducted by Marin Alsop) shapes more sustained soundscapes, occasionally fascinatingly alien: the pitchless grind of bows into strings creating a flickering Geiger counter effect, or the scissors raised high above the chorus’s heads, snapped shut in unison with metallic bite.
With so many moving parts – an all-female professional chamber choir and youth chorus; a slow-strafing slideshow of black and white photographs and archive film footage created by Jeff Sugg; ritual gestures and movements by director Anne Kauffman – it would be easy for the music to turn into a soundtrack. The distilled clarity of Wolfe’s score ensures it doesn’t, aided here by outstanding performances from London Voices as well as the RSNO Youth Chorus and Farnham Youth Choir – all crisply and undemonstratively marshalled by Alsop.
The work ends (echoes of John Adams’ 9/11 homage On the Transmigration of Souls) with a litany of the names of the dead. It’s a statement that would have been impossible until 2011, when the final victims were at last identified, just a year before a fire in a Bangladesh garment factory killed 124.
