The Little Match Girl
Lang was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in music for his piece "The Little Match Girl Passion", composed in 2007 for Paul Hillier and his Theatre of Voices. The piece, based on Hans Christian Andersen's fable "The Little Match Girl" and inspired by Bach's "St. Matthew Passion", was co-commissioned by the Carnegie Hall Corporation and the Perth Theatre and Concert Hall and premiered on October 25, 2007, in Zankel Hall in New York City. Tim Page of "The Washington Post" wrote that "I don't think that I've ever been so moved by a new...composition as I was by David Lang's "The Little Match Girl Passion", which is unlike any music I know." For the 2017 Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual holiday concert, which has included "the little match girl passion" for five years, Lang has written a new version called "the little match girl (observed)", in which the audience is the congregation and participates with interstitial hymns.