Spotlight / November 2023
Amazing Gifts Missy Mazzoli’s operas are poised to receive extraordinary attention. By Adam Wasserman
© Todd Rosenberg
COMPOSER MISSY MAZZOLI’S works give the impression that all of her technical abilities have been applied to the sensual immediacy of a story, with the drama of every moment under her compositional control. Her operas pull multiple strains and timbres from a kind of sonic subconsciousness, but the end result appears seamless: it’s hard to tell where her musical skills stop and her dramatic instincts begin. “I can see patterns as I look back at the last five works over the last ten years,” Mazzoli tells me during our August interview. “I’m drawn to stories about women in extreme situations. That’s a common thread in almost all of my work. I’m drawn to stories that have a sort of surreal quality and an element of otherworldliness to them, a magical realism or something that’s supernatural. Even in my instrumental works, there was always some sort of narrative thread or cinematic bent. When I found opera, it was this immediate feeling of coming home. I thought, ‘This is what I’ve been working towards this entire time without even realizing it.’” Over the next few seasons, Mazzoli’s compositions are poised to receive a level of attention that is, by any measure, extraordinary. This season, Proving Up, her adaptation of Karen Russell’s ghost story set among Nebraska homesteaders, plays at Pittsburgh Opera, and Breaking the Waves, her devastating opera based on the film by Lars von Trier, arrives at Detroit Opera. As part of its O24 festival, Opera Philadelphia is slated to present the American premiere of her 2022 work The Listeners, which Lyric Opera of Chicago also plans to present in a future season. Given the dramatic and musical exactitude of her compositions, it’s a surprise to hear Mazzoli say that she has little trouble letting go of a work once it’s complete. “It’s actually delightful. I’m the kind of composer who’s very willing to send my little operatic babies out into the world and let them thrive in the way that they are going to. I let the work go where it wants to go, and I’m very happy to realize that the work can be done by a group of students, as well as professional companies,” she says. “While it’s not realistic for me to be at every performance, I try to go to as many as I can. As a living composer, as a female composer, as someone who’s relatively young in terms of the typical age of opera composers, I think it’s important for me to stand up there onstage and show my face.”
Kiera Duffy as Bess in Breaking the Waves at Opera Philadelphia, 2016 © Dominic M. Mercier for Opera Philadelphia
When we connect in late summer, Mazzoli has just submitted to the Metropolitan Opera the piano–vocal score for her adaptation of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, which the company commissioned from her in 2018 and reportedly plans to present in 2026. “I haven’t slept in a really long time, and I’m just going off the grid for a week,” she says, laughing. “I said to everyone in my life, ‘I’m done. I’m finally done.’ But there’ll be a series of workshops, and obviously I have to orchestrate it. But this is a big milestone, to have handed in the first draft. It’s probably been the most fun piece to write, in my experience.” The work dramatizes Abraham Lincoln’s grief at the death of his young son,
whose soul now resides in a kind of purgatorial space overcrowded with the cantankerous ghosts of a Civil War-roiled America. “Because everyone in the opera is dead, except for Lincoln, it really opened up my musical palette. It inspired me to find a lot of strange sounds that wouldn’t work in a slightly more realistic setting. But because we’re in a graveyard and everyone’s a ghost, it allows for so much experimentation and so many wacky ideas.” In conversation, Mazzoli repeatedly comes back to the experience of performing as a conduit to composition. “I think I’ll always perform,” she tells me. “It’s an essential part of what I do, and even when I’m composing, I’m constantly playing the piano. There’s a tactile-ness to the writing process that is essential. I think it’s really important to stand in front of people and say, ‘This is a piece that I wrote, and I’m going to play it for you.’” Likewise, the chance to create art through collaboration seems fundamental to her identity as an artist; there’s not a whiff of the composer-as-lone-genius about her. She reflexively credits both her friend Royce Vavrek, who has contributed the texts for each of her operas, and her band, Victoire, for which she composes and plays keyboard. “I have a lot of composer friends who don’t actually like to write opera, because there’s too many cooks in the kitchen. They want to be the sole author of everything, and they want to control every moment,” she says. “It’s like, yeah, you probably shouldn’t write opera, because opera is too big for that. It’s an amazing tool and an amazing gift to have all this input in the room. It doesn’t bother me at all.”
Adam Wasserman is the Digital Editor at OPERA NEWS.