The image of Sor Juana as tragic heroine, based on her renunciation of secular letters in the last years of her life, has dominated biographical re–creations in novels and film. They follow the classic operatic plot, in which the destruction of queens and courtesans seems an inevitable result of their transgressive desires. As Catherina Clément has observed, “the emotion is never as poignant as when [the voice] is lifted to die.” In the case of Sor Juana, her desires have been represented as sexual as well as intellectual challenges to authority. By focusing on her silence as patriarchal retribution, we risk losing the eloquence and diverse registers of her voice. There are, however, other songs, even in contemporary operas like those by Daniel Crozier and Peter Krask (With Blood, With Ink, 1993) and by Carla Lucero and Alicia Gaspar de Alba (Juana, in progress). Music, as the most abstract of the arts, offers us other interpretations of Sor Juana’s achievement. This article analyzes music that responds to Sor Juana’s poetry with voice and diverse instrumental combinations: Marcela Rodríguez’s Funesta: Seis arias sobre textos de sor Juana; John Eaton’s Sor Juana’s Dreams, Sor Juana Songs, and Tocotín; John Adams’s Nativity Cantata, El Niño, which includes two villancicos; as well as the two contemporary operas.