On the morning of 25 March 1911, 146 garment workers — mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women — died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village. Management had locked the stairwells and exits. The disaster is one of American labor history's most documented atrocities, which makes it a dangerous subject for art: the pull toward memorial grandeur, toward symbol, toward the 146 becoming a metaphor for Something Larger, is almost irresistible. Julia Wolfe resists it. Fire in My Mouth, Wolfe's 2019 multimedia oratorio and the third in her series of large-scale works on American labor history, opened the Southbank Centre's autumn season at the Royal Festival Hall. It arrives in London the same year as Wolfe's unEarth at the Barbican — an earlier 2026 piece about the climate emergency — and the contrast is instructive. Where unEarth preaches, Fire in My Mouth dramatises. Its text is drawn largely from verbatim accounts of survivors and contemporaries, and Wolfe never widens the lens to let the tragedy become a touchstone or the individuals become archetypes. These are specific women. That specificity is the piece's moral and aesthetic spine. The score is kinetically constructed around the sounds of labor itself. Sewing machines clack and whir inside the orchestral texture; the ocean crossing — rendered in the immigrant women's own words, 'without passports or anything' — swells beneath the choral entries. Text is fragmented and superimposed in motoric patterns until consonants stop meaning and start functioning: verbal pistons and levers. The Philharmonia, conducted by Marin Alsop, provides a sustained orchestral substrate beneath the choral machinery — occasionally strange in ways that reward attention, including passages where bows are ground into strings without pitch, producing a sound like a Geiger counter, and a moment where scissors held above the chorus's heads are snapped shut in unison with metallic precision. With this many moving parts — an all-female professional chamber choir, a youth chorus, a slow-strafing slideshow of archive photographs and film footage designed by Jeff Sugg, choreographed gestures directed by Anne Kauffman — the risk is always that the music becomes a soundtrack to the visuals. It doesn't, largely because Wolfe's score is distilled to the point of being self-sufficient, and because the London Voices, the RSNO Youth Chorus, and the Farnham Youth Choir deliver performances that are crisp and undemonstrative in exactly the way the material demands. Alsop marshals all of it with control that never tips into tidiness. The work ends as John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls ends: with names. A litany of the dead, each one spoken or sung. Adams did it for the 9/11 victims; Wolfe does it here for the Triangle workers — and the choice carries a specific historical weight that Adams' piece couldn't, because the final victims of the Triangle fire weren't identified until 2011, a century after the event. That identification came just a year before a fire in a Bangladesh garment factory killed 124 workers under comparable conditions. Wolfe doesn't editorialize about that parallel. She doesn't need to.
