Love and Death and the Meaning of Life

Click here to read Part 1 and Part 2 of Opera Love Stories

Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s Breaking the Waves is a fearless, powerful, revelatory work of art. Which is why—for just a moment—during our Zoom conversation ahead of the critically acclaimed opera’s regional premiere at HGO, it surprises me as she tells me she initially balked at the idea.

“You know, the movie is chilling,” she says. “I remember watching it alone on my laptop, which is not the way anyone should watch Breaking the Waves, and then just slamming the laptop when it was done, and feeling freaked out.”

But it wouldn’t leave her alone. “I kept imagining this world and imagining the deep psychology that Lars von Trier creates, and most importantly, the fact that the film only is able to illuminate a certain part of that psychology, just by virtue of the nature of the genre.” The movie left a lot of territory unexplored. “It’s a brilliant, perfect film,” she says. “But there’s all these layers to the characters that a film can’t explore and that an opera can.”

Laptop slamming aside, Missy soon realized it was just the kind of story she loves to explore. “All of my work, even if it doesn’t include voices, is about people and human struggles and complicated emotions,” she says. “I’m not interested in creating characters that are very clearly good guys or bad guys. I think that that’s completely uninteresting, and that’s a misuse of opera’s subtlety and power. I’m much more interested in creating characters, particularly female characters, that have a mystery to them, a subtlety, where you’re not sure if this path of behavior is right or good for them or for anybody.”

Missy and Royce, her longtime librettist, had found their next project—and a compelling, if unconventional, protagonist in Bess. “We don’t always know whether to root for her or to just try to stop her from doing whatever she’s doing,” she explains. “So I think that that conflict in the audience is very, very powerful.”

She began to build a sonic world around the story—one that, like all her work, whether she’s writing for a chamber ensemble or her own band—inhabits the in-between. “I’ve always been interested in creating sounds that are not wholly happy or sad, or dissonant or consonant. I’m always existing in the cracks between emotions, the cracks between genres, the cracks between different harmonies and tonalities and traditions.”

And though she’d written operatic works before, it was while writing Breaking the Waves that Missy’s own opera love story truly began.

“There was really a very specific moment when I fell in love with opera in a big way,” she shares. “I was working on Breaking the Waves at Opera Philadelphia, workshopping a scene. The director, Daniel Fish, started asking me about the psychology of the characters. And I realized I’d been waiting my whole life for someone to talk to me about music in this way, from a theatrical perspective. And it felt like this immediate homecoming.”

Breaking the Waves made its world premiere at Opera Philadelphia in 2016, and the love story it launched between Missy and opera was both powerful and mutual—Opera News named it one of the best operas of the 21st century. The experience, she says, was life-altering. “It changed the way that I thought about myself, and the way that I thought about my potential as an artist, and the way that I thought about opera’s potential to move people.”

From there, she dove deeper and deeper into the art form. In 2021, another opera Missy wrote with Royce, The Listeners, debuted in Oslo, to ecstatic critical acclaim, with the New Yorker calling it “mesmerizing.” The duo’s next major world premiere is on the way, a hotly anticipated commission from the Metropolitan Opera: Lincoln in the Bardo, based on the novel by George Saunders. That work is set to debut at the Met in the 2026-27 season.

Following its breakout success, Breaking the Waves has continued to find new life on the world’s grand stages. In 2019, the opera made its European debut at the Edinburgh International Festival, in a new co-production from Opera Ventures, Scottish Opera, and HGO, in association with Bristol Old Vic, directed by Tom Morris. HGO’s presentation of the work was delayed by the pandemic, but during our conversation, Missy tells me she’s glad we’re featuring it as part of our truly, madly, deeply season-long exploration of love.

“I love that this is part of a love theme because I do think that at its core, Breaking the Waves is a love story. It is. And that gets sort of lost in the extreme nature of this fictional narrative,” she says.

“I keep thinking about this one random moment when this woman in Philadelphia—I’m going to cry just thinking about it because it was so crazy and surprising,” she says. “She came up to me after Breaking the Waves and said, I lost my husband a few years ago, and so I was so happy to see that you had taken this on as an opera, because I see this story as a true love story, and it was only in my grief after losing my husband that I was able to see it that way.

“I had never met this woman before, and within a minute of meeting each other, she was explaining how her grief journey made her understand this story, and how she found a sense of peace and a modicum of comfort through this. And I love that. I love that about being an artist. I love that about being in opera, that within two seconds, you’re talking about love and death and the meaning of life.”