Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Any opera singer approaching their part will nearly always ask themselves: what personal experience can I draw on to bring my character to life? For Canadian baritone Joshua Hopkins, who will appear in the orchestral debut of a song cycle at Carnegie Hall in New York next week, this question has a painfully obvious answer. Songs for Murdered Sisters, composed by Jake Heggie, set to words by Margaret Atwood, is based on Hopkins’ own personal tragedy: the killing of his sister, Nathalie Warmerdam, in 2015. Warmerdam was one of three women murdered on the same morning in 2015 in Renfrew County, Ontario, by their former partner. She was his third victim, after 66-year-old public servant Carol Culleton and 36-year-old Anastasia Kuzyk. Nathalie, 48, was at home with one of her two children when the killer burst in and shot her dead. Basil Borutski was given a life sentence in 2017 and died in prison last year. The triple homicide is considered one of the most extreme cases of domestic murder in Canada’s modern history and turned Hopkins, 46, into an activist against gender-based violence. “Upon reflection, it shouldn’t have taken my sister’s murder for me to realise that gender-based violence is such a rampant issue,” he tells me on a video call from his home in Houston. “It’s a subject that doesn’t get enough attention.”Reports following the killings reveal how egregiously the three women were let down by the systemHopkins conceived Songs for Murdered Sisters “to honour the memory of my sister”. Intense and forceful, the set of eight songs runs the emotional gamut. In song three, “Anger”, one can hear a rageful Hopkins sing with feverish power: “You opened the door and death was standing there / red death, red anger, anger.” Song four, “Dream”, retreats into a different space. An intimate reflection, the ethereal accompaniment undulates underneath Hopkins, whose vocals take on the voices of himself and his sister as children playing together.“The only way as a musician, artist, actor that I know how to honour her is to use my singing voice to express my emotional reaction,” he says.Hopkins, who performs internationally in venues including the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Semperoper in Dresden and Glyndebourne in the UK, calls Heggie and Atwood a “dream team”. He had worked with Heggie, a leading American composer, on previous projects, and as they began thinking about how to tell Nathalie’s story, decided that they needed a woman’s voice, and for that woman to be Canadian. When they emailed Atwood to ask if she’d like to write words for the songs, her response was immediate. She wrote back: “I have known several women who have been murdered by partners and ex-partners.” Plans to premiere the songs in 2020 were cancelled due to Covid-19 lockdowns, leading Hopkins and Heggie to reverse the normal order of production proceedings. Instead of first performing the songs live and then recording them and filming a video, Hopkins laid down the vocals and shot the video first, something he describes as “a cathartic experience, a silver lining”.Hopkins comes from a musical family. Both of his parents were members of amateur local musical groups, and Nathalie, a flute player, joined them. “We were never in the band together because she was 12 years my senior,” Hopkins says. “She loved music.”Their work has enabled me to process this and create meaning out of something so devastatingReports following the murders reveal how egregiously the three women were let down by the system. Hopkins gave testimony at an inquest in 2022, during which Nathalie’s son described the many ways his mother had tried to protect herself legally against Borutski, who had a long, known history of intimate partner violence. Since the inquest, nearly 100 municipalities in Ontario have declared intimate partner violence as an “epidemic”.“Systemic changes are so slow in being implemented,” Hopkins says. “Widespread misogyny runs the world. The foundations of the world have been built on misogynist views that create this toxic environment. We need to engage in a conversation with these men.” Songs for Murdered Sisters is one of the campaigns that White Ribbon, a global movement of boys and men working to end gender-based violence against girls and women, has supported. When the film of Songs for Murdered Sisters was released, Hopkins launched a social media campaign challenging 10,000 men to take the White Ribbon pledge “to never commit, condone or remain silent about all forms of gender-based violence”. He says he intends to donate a portion of his fee to local organisations who share that mission. Talking to Hopkins, it is clear that he believes live music and drama have a particular power to effect change. “There’s something so powerful and communicative about hearing vocal cords resonating naturally,” he says. “We as human beings need that acoustic experience to go back to the primal, childlike wonder of hearing natural sound being produced.”Hopkins speaks often of vulnerability in his music, and it’s clear that, for him, Songs for Murdered Sisters is an opportunity for the most intimate kind. “Who was my sister / Is now an empty chair / Is no longer / Is no longer there / She is now emptiness / She is now air,” he sings in the opening song. “There is power in someone like me, who has experienced devastating loss, to be vulnerable to an audience,” he says. “My hope is that my desire to be vulnerable in front of other people will inspire other people to own up to their emotions.”There has been much research on the ways in which music can be used as medicine, and while musical rhythm and patterns have been shown to help with everything from rewiring memory to correcting physical tics, there is a powerful and more ambiguous dimension of music, which is its potential to heal emotional wounds. Hopkins describes Atwood’s and Heggie’s work as “an unexpected gift . . . given to me to be able to process this and create meaning out of something so devastating.” In Renfrew County, a stone monument inscribed with the names of women killed by their partners in the area was erected in 2013. Karen, Delores, Margaret, Pamela, Ann Marie, Michelle . . . The list is now so long it spills across two columns. “My sister’s name, as well as Carol and Anastasia, have been added since 2015,” Hopkins said when he visited the site. “There are far too many names on that stone.”Joshua Hopkins will perform ‘Songs for Murdered Sisters’ with the Philadelphia Orchestra on January 9 and 11 at Philadelphia’s Marian Anderson Hall, and on January 15 at New York’s Carnegie Hall; songsformurderedsisters.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
