There was barely time to read the reviews.
Missy Mazzoli awoke in Edinburgh last month to a stack of raves for “The Galloping Cure,” a Scottish Opera production that had its world premiere the night before at the Edinburgh International Festival. “One of the greatest operas of the century,” read the headline in The Times of London.
But Mazzoli was already preparing for a return to New York for the technical run-through of her next opera, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” based on George Saunders’s 2017 novel, opening at the Metropolitan Opera in October.
That is also a world premiere.
Over the past 10 years, Mazzoli has vaulted to the vanguard of a new generation of opera composers with her gripping and idiosyncratic compositions: sweeping waves of drama and disorientation, drawing on such unlikely sounds as kazoos (“Lincoln”) and electronic four-on-the-floor dance beats (“Cure”).
The music drives topical librettos, most written by her longtime collaborator, Royce Vavrek. “Lincoln,” an otherworldly tale of the president leading his country through the Civil War while struggling with the death of his son, tackles the political polarization that gripped the country in the 1860s — with obvious echoes of the United States today. “The Galloping Cure,” an update of Kafka’s “A Country Doctor,” is a darkly humorous and disturbing story of addiction, an allegory for today’s opioid crisis.
“I don’t feel that opera has to stay stuck in the past,” Mazzoli said in an interview at the Hub, the former church that is the International Festival headquarters in Edinburgh. “I really want my work to spark a conversation among the audience, with the critics, with the press. I just want people to come out asking more questions than they have answers.”
At 45, and just 14 years after writing her first opera, Mazzoli is presenting two world premieres on two continents in the space of 10 weeks, both written with Vavrek. “It’s nearly killed me,” she said, “but it’s been exhilarating.”
“Lincoln in the Bardo” is the first world premiere opera the Met has presented written by a woman. And Mazzoli is one of only two women (Jeanine Tesori, who wrote “Grounded,” is the other) to have been awarded Met commissions. “I’m not surprised at all it’s her — I’m surprised it took so long,” said Anthony Roth Costanzo, the general director and president of Opera Philadelphia, a countertenor who sings the role of Miss Elise Traynor in “Lincoln.” “The Met is really expanding their investment in new work. And to have Missy’s voice feels right.”
Mazzoli, who has written seven operas, has emerged as a musical refutation to the notion that the art form is a creaky, elitist holdover from another century. “Missy is one of the shining lights of music,” said Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director at the Met. She “can bring new audiences,” he added. “That’s the common thread with composers of our time. This generation now is a bit more connected to film music, pop music. She’s definitely bridging with other types of music and other types of art forms.”
Christine Goerke, a soprano singing the Reverend in “Lincoln,” said Mazzoli crossed boundaries in a way that is critical at a moment when opera is struggling to win new and younger audiences. “She’ll write something that sounds tonal and then she’ll go off the rails,” Goerke said. “The people who want atonal music — it’s there. The people who are looking for something more traditional — it’s there.”
By her account, Mazzoli has loved music since she was a girl, taking piano lessons once a week while growing up in Lansdale, about 25 miles north of Philadelphia, the daughter of two special education teachers. She studied music in college and graduate school, but her entry to opera came through an unlikely portal: MTV with its eye-popping barrage of splashy, jangling videos, from groups like Guns N’ Roses and the Bangles.
“Every emotion was heightened and exaggerated,” she said. “That’s what I like about opera: That it’s a music-driven story where every emotion is taken to an extreme.”
She was 18 when she saw her first opera. A student in the College of Fine Arts at Boston University, she hopped a bus for New York to see Berg’s “Wozzeck” at the Metropolitan Opera. “Yes!” she said. “From the last seat of the last row, like where it’s so high you can touch the ceiling. And loved it.”
After hearing Berg, she was drawn to the works of Benjamin Britten, Kaija Saariaho and Thomas Adès. But her ideas and inspiration have come just as much from the pop, rock and indie concerts she attended with Vavrek. They saw the Swans at Brooklyn Steel and Beyoncé at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. They count among their biggest influences Broken Social Scene, a Canadian indie band; and Belle and Sebastian, the Scottish indie pop band.
“The musical world at large is exciting,” said Vavrek, who collaborated with her on six of her operas. “We are not siloed in the classical music world.”
Yet their operas are distinguished as much by their subjects as by the music. “I feel like I was born in the right place at the right time, when it comes to writing political opera in America,” Mazzoli said.
Matthew Shilvock, the chief executive officer of the San Francisco Opera, which co-commissioned “The Galloping Cure” (it will open there in 2027), said he jumped at the chance to back the project because it captured the trauma the city was experiencing with its epidemic of drug abuse.
“My very first thought was that this is so on the nose; it is appropriate to put it on the stage here,” he said. “Even a few blocks around the opera house you are seeing the manifestation of fentanyl abuse.”
In “The Galloping Cure,” Mazzoli and Vavrek draw on tragedies that shadowed their lives: Two of Mazzoli’s cousins died of drug overdoses, and Vavrek’s father died of alcoholism.
And Mazzoli is fascinated by death in a way that is reflected both in “Galloping Cure” and “Lincoln in the Bardo,” a novel about ghosts, trapped in a netherworld as they await what comes next. Mazzoli is a trained death doula, guiding people during their final days — including her own father, in 2024. She called the experience “absolutely life changing.”
“I took a course called Going With Grace, led by the fantastic doula Alua Arthur,” she said. “I have always been drawn to end-of-life-care, but never had time to train to become a hospice nurse.”
Mazzoli had not planned to oversee two major openings on two continents in the space of a few months. In 2018, she met with Gelb and Nézet-Séguin, who commissioned her to write an opera — anything she wanted. “I blanked out for 30 minutes,” she said, recalling that moment.
“I hadn’t really prepared many ideas,” she said. “I kind of blurted out ‘Lincoln in the Bardo.’ I just thought that it kind of has everything you want. It’s funny, it’s tragic and it’s about America, it’s about a divided America, which felt very topical.”
She met with Saunders, who told her over lunch that he had been envisioning his book as a potential opera when writing it. “By the time I walked in there, I knew I was going to say yes,” Saunders said of his lunch with Mazzoli. “What emanated from her was cool, artistic confidence. With that confidence she also had an excitement that I recognized from my own process, when you come up with an idea that is going to work for you.”
“She brought up the idea of having kazoos in the orchestra,” Saunders said. “I was like — that’s it! A kazoo is exactly right. It was the humor and having to step right in and acknowledge the magic of it and the supernatural element of it.”
Mazzoli has lived for most of her 20 years in New York in Brooklyn, though she just moved — “I’m a traitor” — to Washington Heights. She wrote “Lincoln” at home in Brooklyn during the pandemic, quarantined and recovering from Covid. Its opening was delayed because of the pandemic shutdown. In the meantime, the opportunity arose to write “Galloping Cure” for the Edinburgh festival. “And you have to just jump on these opportunities when they happen,” she said.
It meant she and Vavrek were writing two operas simultaneously.
It was not as difficult as it might sound, she said. “I was orchestrating ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ at the same time when I was writing the initial piano score for Galloping Cure,” she said. “So that helped me keep it separate, psychologically.”
And these are two very different stories, set in different eras, and that is reflected in the instrumentation, tonality and singing.
“In opera, I love to bring in wild vocal effects, obviously unusual sounds, but you have to kind of have a dramatic reason,” she said. That was easier with “Lincoln,” because of the story. “If you’re dealing with ghosts, that palette can expand because the justification can be ‘this person’s a ghost.’”
Case in point: Costanzo’s character, who slips through many forms in rapid succession, including a flamingo, a witch, a crow, a furnace and a mouse.
“Her work has an undercurrent of darkness to it which makes it interesting,” Costanzo said. “What’s unusual about ‘Lincoln’ is that the darkness in it mixes with the hilarities that are going to make this really stand out.”
David Lang, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who taught her composition at Yale University, where she earned a master’s degree in 2006, said she was particularly suited to this moment of change, as opera companies look to expand beyond traditional repertoire.
“She’s really plowed headfirst into this world,” he said. “There’s a need for it. If you’ve ever gone to a dinner with a traditional opera lover at the Met, and they just talk about, ‘Oh, I saw the new production of ‘Norma,’ and let me complain how it’s not like the production I saw 30 years ago.’ It is the most backward and limiting way to talk about an art form.”
Mazzoli said that the opera she is writing is intended as much for new audiences as for traditional ones. “It doesn’t have to be either opera is on the streets or opera is white tie,” she said. “There’s room for all of it. The idea that opera is only for people in tuxedos, that is the perception we are fighting against.”
Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Met, called Mazzoli “one of the greatest and most prolific composers of today” and argued that “the future of our art form has to rely upon accessible new work.”
He added: “What’s interesting about her is she is someone that the critics can like — and also, I can like: Works that are theatrically engaging, musically thrilling and accessible to the audiences. ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ is not going to be the only opera by Missy we are going to be performing at the Met.”
The post Pushing Opera Into the Future With Dance Beats, Kazoos and Abe Lincoln appeared first on New York Times.
