First lady and affected families in audience for highly charged performance of excerpts of Mothers of Kherson First lady and affected families in audience for highly charged performance of excerpts of Mothers of Kherson I t was hard to imagine an opera with a subject more potentially traumatic – or cathartic – for the assembled audience. The occasion, in the grand and gilded spaces of the National Opera of Ukraine, in Kyiv, was the premiere of excerpts of Mothers of Kherson, an opera about the