The Spirit of Wagner Award

Carrying the Flame

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Songs and Instrumental Music

This is where music becomes meaning.

Welcome to Georgia Shreve’s studio of keys and cadence — a soundscape of seasons, voices, and melodic design.

A cup of tea with lemon sits near a scattering of lozenges — subtle signs of a life spent thinking about voice, caring for it, composing for it. Dyson headphones rest nearby, the ones Georgia uses to hear what’s there, and to know what’s missing. Close to them: her Christmas album, featuring original holiday songs — gentle, melodic, and precise. Music designed not to dazzle, but to stay.

Across the piano’s surface, sheet music spreads out beneath autumn leaves — a visual nod to her Piano Concerto and Four Seasons, her interdisciplinary collaboration with time-lapse photography. These aren’t seasonal as theme. They are seasonal in form. Works that move as light does. Gradually. With color and change.

A copy of Dylan Thomas’s poetry rests nearby — a direct inspiration for multiple works. Georgia has set his words to music not as a translation, but as a continuation. His lines speak. Her notes answer.

A series of chimes rests beside it — the actual instrument referenced in her piece Chimes, one of her most crystalline works. Minimal. Resonant. Built on echo and simplicity.

At the center of the piano lies a boxed tableau: Lives of a Woman, a song cycle composed around the phases of a woman’s life. The objects are tiny, but loaded with meaning:

A pacifier for childhood
A camellia blossom for adolescence
A house key and graduation tassel for independence
A wedding ring for union
A scattering of Werther’s candies for age, sweetness, and reflection

Each object corresponds to a song. Each song corresponds to a season. Each season becomes a voice — named, scored, and remembered.

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Original compositions for voice, piano, chamber ensemble, and full orchestra

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Original songs

Premiered  At

Roles

A Narrative Builder, Songwriter, Composer, and Lyricist, she weaves centuries of myth and language into works ranging from full-scale operas to intimate miniatures.

Listen to Georgia’s instrumental recordings
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Explore her vocal works, song cycles, and seasonal compositions

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Songs and Instrumental Music

by Georgia

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Songs and Instrumental Music
Margaret
A Carnegie Hall-premiered (2010) and recorded (2010) tenor-and-piano setting of Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” "Margaret" transforms a child’s grief over autumn leaves into a spare, piercing meditation on mortality, memory, and the first knowledge of loss.
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Songs and Instrumental Music
Fantasia on Celtic Themes
Premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2015, "Fantasia on Celtic Themes" reworks traditional Celtic songs for soprano, tenor, and baritone, turning folk material into a cohesive dramatic journey of longing, love, and ritual memory.
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Songs and Instrumental Music
Easter 1916
In "Easter 1916," Georgia Shreve sets W.B. Yeats for soprano, tenor, baritone, and chamber orchestra, transforming a canonical political poem into a layered vocal drama of witness, grief, and historical change. Premiered at Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall (May 2017), the work’s recurring refrain, “A terrible beauty is born,” evolves from observation into moral reckoning with each return.
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Songs and Instrumental Music
Fern Hill
Georgia Shreve’s "Fern Hill" sets Dylan Thomas’s poem as a single, sweeping dramatic arc, beginning in pastoral radiance and ending in time-bound reckoning. Equally effective in concert and staged contexts, the work balances textual fidelity with emotionally precise musical storytelling.
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Songs and Instrumental Music
The Lives of a Woman
A full-length musical portrait of female life across generations, "The Lives of a Woman" combines ensemble-driven structure, character doubling, and recurring musical motifs to create a cyclical, emotionally layered journey from childhood wonder to mortality and memory.
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Explore more works by Georgia

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Short Stories
The Countess of M—
In nineteenth-century France, a sheltered aristocratic daughter enters a secret romance with a fallen nobleman, discovering both the thrill of being chosen and the cost of defying the social order around her.
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Plays
The Odds
A darkly funny three-scene play about two sisters who grow up treating family dysfunction like a math problem. Ten years later, memory returns with teeth, and “the odds” becomes the name for what was hidden in plain sight.
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Short Stories
The Enigma Variations
In “The Enigma Variations,” a daughter chronicles her composer mother’s brilliance and unraveling as harassment, domestic pressure, and illness sever her from the piano that defines her life. Expansive, intimate, and devastating, the story is both elegy and indictment, revealing how a creative life can be erased long before death.
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Poetry
Mother in the Snow
In “Mother in the Snow,” Georgia Shreve turns a winter stumble into a piercing portrait of maternal endurance under watchful eyes. Dark humor and raw imagery reveal a woman improvising her way forward while trying to hold dignity, and herself, together.
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Poetry
No Pity for Pigeons
In “No Pity for Pigeons,” Georgia Shreve transforms a quiet park encounter into a piercing social portrait of class, displacement, and human vulnerability. What begins with birds and cake ends with a deeper grief: not for pigeons, but for people quietly pushed to the margins of the worlds they once called ordinary.
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Poetry
You, we, I
In “You, We, I,” Shreve turns pronouns into emotional architecture, mapping how intimacy moves between fusion and fracture. With spare, incantatory lines, the poem captures two people reaching for truth through glare, innocence, and uncertainty, before landing on a haunting final shift from “we” back to “I.”
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Poetry
New Life
In “New Life,” Shreve imagines reinvention as metalwork: each day newly minted, each love a chance to re-stamp the self. Through images of repaired bridges, open doors, and an untouched bed, the poem captures the vulnerable mechanics of beginning again without denying what came before.
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Poetry
Is There a Poem in the House?
In “Is There a Poem in the House?”, Shreve turns inspiration into a haunting presence that seeps through walls, books, and breath before vanishing again. By merging domestic imagery with artistic dread, the poem captures the fragile cycle of creative arrival and loss with wit, unease, and precision.
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