Grounded

Jeanine Tesori's Grounded presents a searing portrait of modern warfare through the eyes of a fighter pilot confronting the unbridgeable distance between duty and conscience. The opera follows a skilled aviator whose life transforms when she is reassigned from cockpit to command center, operating armed drones from a stateside facility. What begins as a relief—proximity to family, safety from immediate danger—evolves into a harrowing psychological unraveling. Night after night, she witnesses targets in grayscale monitors, makes split-second decisions about distant lives, and returns home to suburban normalcy where the weight of those choices accumulates in silence. Tesori's score interweaves intimate solo passages with the mechanical drone of technology, creating a visceral soundscape that mirrors the protagonist's fractured existence. The opera asks urgent questions about the human cost of remote warfare, the moral weight of invisible consequences, and the impossible burden placed on those asked to kill without seeing the full humanity of their targets. Raw, contemporary, and devastatingly relevant, Grounded strips away mythology to expose the raw nerves of twenty-first-century conflict.