Music

Can Missy Mazzoli Help Reinvent Opera in America?

CFA alum, composer, and Grammy nominee is working on a major commission from the Metropolitan Opera—and on widening the path for women in the field

Last November, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York called for an “artistic reinvention” of the form in an op-ed headlined “How to Save Opera in America? Make It New Again.”

Opera companies battling pandemic losses, audience and donor declines, and competition from streaming media need to find new ways to sustain themselves, Peter Gelb wrote in the New York Times, and that starts on the stage.

Maybe he had that in mind back in 2018, when he commissioned composer Missy Mazzoli to write a new opera for the Met. Mazzoli (CFA’02) seems likely to be a prominent player in opera’s future in America after what anyone would call a pretty good 2024.

Start with the New Yorker’s rave review of the American premiere of her “seductively nightmarish” and distinctly contemporary opera The Listeners, in which critic Alex Ross called her a “magician of the orchestra.”

Then there was the news that Mazzoli was one of two recipients of the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music at the New York Philharmonic, recognizing “extraordinary artistic endeavors in the field of new music” with $200,000 and a commission for a work to premiere in 2027.

She even made her debut on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert earlier in the year, briefly joining in on keyboard as violinist Jennifer Koh played pieces Mazzoli has written for her during their long friendship.

All this while she edited her opera Lincoln in the Bardo, her commission from the Metropolitan Opera based on George Saunders’ acclaimed novel, set to debut there in 2026; it’s another installment of her ongoing collaboration with Pulitzer Prize–winning librettist Royce Vavrek.

That’s a lot of winning, especially for a woman in classical music, a field often dominated by dead white men.

Gelb is the Maria Manetti Shrem General Manager of the Met, the preeminent opera company in America, and an important voice globally. He wrote in his Times piece that “opera faces its greatest existential challenge” today, with many companies overly reliant on core repertoire more than a century old. The answer, he said, lies in artistic reinvention, especially new operas by living composers that feature “inventive, propulsive scores and intriguing subjects” that will pull in younger audiences.

“Opera’s future depends in part on dynamic new operas that speak to today’s audiences, which is why we’re so excited about the pending Met premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s Lincoln in the Bardo,” Gelb told Bostonia. “Missy is one of the foremost composers of her generation, who has a singular and captivating voice.”

The Brooklyn-based Mazzoli and her contemporary Jeanine Tesori were the first two women ever to receive main-stage commissions from the Met, in 2018. Tesori’s Grounded bowed last fall, and Lincoln in the Bardo is set to debut at Lincoln Center in October 2026.

“I think it’s important for company leaders to think about the role opera can play in our modern world,” says Mazzoli, long a vocal advocate for women in classical music. “I think it’s important to commission a large variety of composers from varied backgrounds in order to show the complex reality, beauty, and depth of human experience.”

“Once in a Generation”

Lincoln in the Bardo is based on Saunders’ best-selling Booker Prize winner from 2017, which focuses on Abraham Lincoln’s grief over the death of his young son and takes place among the many inhabitants of the “bardo,” a middle ground between life and death. Mazzoli and Vavrek have been in contact with Saunders throughout, and the author will be on hand when the opera is workshopped at New York’s Chautauqua Institution this summer.

“He’s one of my favorite writers,” says Mazzoli. “The ideas for the subjects always originate with me and with Royce, if we’re working together. It has to be something that we are really enthusiastic about, because we’re the ones that have to spend years of our lives writing this.”

As she continues to edit Lincoln in the Bardo, she and Vavrek are collaborating again, this time on The Galloping Cure, commissioned by several groups, including Opera Ventures, San Francisco Opera, and Norrlandsoperan in Sweden.

“We’re retelling a Kafka story [A Country Doctor] in the context of the opioid crisis,” she says, based on a story written for them by another of her favorite authors, Karen Russell.

Mazzoli’s life and Vavrek’s have been touched by addictions among friends and family. In The Galloping Cure, a charming man comes to a small town, peddling a magical cure for pain in the form of a carousel ride; a local doctor endorses it, only to realize that the cure may be worse than the problem.

“I love that these large theatrical works stir up questions or even agitation in the listener,” Mazzoli says. “I also love the collaborative aspects of opera. Even a small opera usually involves dozens of collaborators who inspire me to take bold risks in my music.”

Mazzoli and Vavrek, artistic director of Toronto’s experimental opera company Against the Grain Theatre, have collaborated regularly since they met at a workshop at Carnegie Hall around 2010. She handed him a flyer for what would become her first opera, Song from the Uproar. “She was doing a presentation of 30 or 40 minutes of it at Galapagos Art Space in New York,” Vavrek says. “It was a no-brainer to check it out, and it really did blow me away. Her musical voice was so singular.”

They hit it off artistically. After finishing Song from the Uproar (2012) together, they went on to create Breaking the Waves (2016), Proving Up (2018), and The Listeners (2022) before Lincoln in the Bardo.

“We definitely want to be forward-thinking. We want to be pushing the form,” says Vavrek. “Missy is very sonically forward-thinking—like, that’s truly one of her superpowers. She’s always trying to think of how she can communicate something through her brand of music, but in a progressive and new and exciting way.”

The Listeners, commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, and Lyric Opera of Chicago, has an original story by the playwright Jordan Tannahill. The central character is Claire, a schoolteacher in the American West, whose life falls apart when she becomes obsessed with a constant, mysterious, inescapable drone or hum that only some can hear. Eventually, she falls under the sway of the leader of The Listeners, a cult of others who hear the sound.

The opera premiered in September 2022 in Oslo—and last fall’s US premiere at Opera Philadelphia drew the New Yorker’s attention. Ross wrote, “The Listeners is pretty much all Mazzoli: sinuously songful vocal lines, furtively expressive instrumental solos, especially for the woodwinds, a harmonic language that finds newness and strangeness in the interstices of traditional tonality; unerring narrative pacing. Above all, Mazzoli is a once-in-a-generation magician of the orchestra.”

Mazzoli invokes a line one of her teachers attributed to the actor Laurence Olivier: “‘I never read reviews because when they’re bad, they’re wrong. And when they’re good, they’re not good enough.’” But she read this one, she says, noting that Ross even asked to see the score beforehand: “I do think that made me happy because it was a very deep reading of the work.”

Two Grammy Nods

Even with the success of her operas, she still writes concert music. “I love being able to lose myself in music without words,” says Mazzoli, who’s also composer in residence at the Bard College Conservatory of Music.

Concert works include the Kravis Prize commission for the New York Philharmonic, shorter pieces for solo artists (like Koh), chamber pieces (she has written for the Kronos Quartet, among many others), and orchestras (the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra). She received a couple of Grammy nominations for Dark with Excessive Bright (Bis Records, 2023), an album of her work by violinist Peter Herresthal, the Arctic Philharmonic, and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. She also composes for film and TV, including the Amazon TV show Mozart in the Jungle.

But she’s drawn to opera, she says, “because it requires me to build a world the audience can step into over the course of an evening, and because it allows me to address current events and preoccupations in a more direct way than abstract concert music.”

Whatever she’s writing, Mazzoli composes by playing and improvising and thinking in her apartment, typically long after the sun goes down. “I’m doing all these other things—I’m teaching, I’m running a nonprofit,” she says. “So it’s hard to keep a regular schedule, but I would say I’m most creative at night for thinking about new stuff. My prime creative time is like 10 pm to 2 am, because it’s quiet, no one’s calling me, no one’s emailing me. So I love that time.”

For years she used an electric keyboard but recently acquired a more traditional instrument. “I’ve never owned my own piano. At 43, I finally got a piano after being a professional composer for decades,” she says wryly.

Mentoring Young Composers

Ask Mazzoli if her achievements signal positive change for women composers, and she is wary of making that leap.

“It’s dangerous to read into any one female composer’s success and see that as indicative of a larger trend,” she says. “I think we need to keep our eyes focused on the statistics.”

She points to a recent survey of major orchestras by the UK-based Donne Foundation, which showed works by women were only 7.5 percent of global orchestral repertoires in the 2023–2024 season, down slightly from 2020–2021.

It’s a disparity she’s been up against from the beginning.

Mazzoli grew up in small-town Lansdale, Pa., and began playing piano when she was seven; she decided to become a composer at 10. During a summer stint at the BU Tanglewood Institute during high school, she was the only female student in the composing workshop. As an undergraduate at BU, she had an “amazing time” but never had a female composition teacher, and only one other female student entered the composing program before Mazzoli graduated. She never had a class with a female composition teacher at Yale, either, she says, or in postgraduate study at the Royal Conservatoire at the Hague.

Her hunger for change was shaped by the riot grrrl feminist punk movement born in the Pacific Northwest in the early ’90s, which challenged sexism and the patriarchy to the pounding beat of bands including Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney.

“It’s a scene, it’s a community, it’s an attitude,” she says. “I felt very empowered in that community. It really helped form who I am politically and as a feminist. It helped me get my ideas in line.”

It also prepared her to speak up about the narrow opportunities for women in classical—and to act.

“She mentioned this idea that she’d always wanted to start a female composer mentorship program,” says her friend Ellen Reid, a composer who won a 2019 Pulitzer for her opera p r i s m. “And I was like, that’s such a great idea. Why don’t we? Let’s go for it!”

In 2016 they founded the nonprofit Luna Composition Lab, offering mentorship, education, and resources for young female, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming composers ages 13 to 18. Mazzoli and Reid are the artistic directors.

The Luna Lab Fellowship provides six young composers each year with eight months of mentorship, a weeklong festival at the end of each season—featuring master classes from the likes of Koh, Tesori, and soprano Renée Fleming—and a public performance of the fellows’ compositions by the artist in residence (in 2024, that was the storied Kronos Quartet).

Luna Lab also imbues fellows with a special confidence, says 2017–2018 fellow Maya Miro Johnson, now studying for a master’s degree in composition at Yale. For the finale of her lab year, Johnson wrote a brass quintet and conducted its performance.

“It was really meaningful because I got to stand up in front of Missy Mazzoli and Ellen Reid and these really influential people and just do my thing,” she says. “And I think I was so young that I had no self-consciousness. And that lack of fear was really a motivating force [going forward].”

Mazzoli’s voice is as clear in this venue as on the opera stage, Reid says.

“Our field, it’s not easy for anyone, and it becomes more challenging if you’re a woman or a nonbinary composer or a person of color,” Reid says. “Missy took the challenges and the prejudices that she faced and still faces, I’m sure, and alchemized them into a fierce belief and protection of the future. It shows in her teaching and through her work with Luna Lab, and just on a daily basis in the way that she advocates for her peers and shows up for people.”