Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang’s little match girl passion is a quiet devastation, and one of the most acclaimed vocal works of the 21st century. Lang takes this harrowing tale and reframes it through the structure of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion, interweaving Andersen's narrative with newly written crowd and character responses in the tradition of the great choral Passions. The result is something wholly original: a work that holds horror and beauty in the same breath, where the girl's suffering is never far from her hope, and her poverty never fully extinguishes her inner light. In elevating the Little Match Girl's story to the scale of a Passion, Lang asks us to truly see the suffering around us that we tend to ignore.