The true story of the friendship between Maori chief Hōhepa and Pakeha settler Thomas Mason during the New Zealand Wars is told in Jenny McLeod’s ground-breaking new work Hōhepa, premièring at the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington.

Jenny McLeod, widely respected as one of New Zealand’s foremost composers, took up the task of writing the libretto and music of Hōhepa in the late ’90s. Since then, her research has been extensive, based on recorded, personal and oral histories, and the result is a warm and at times humorous opera, epic yet very human at heart.