Missy Mazzoli on Breaking the Waves

American composer Missy Mazzoli was exhausted but exhilarated when she spoke to us from Edinburgh last month - her Kafka-inspired new work The Galloping Cure (which uses an addictive, anodyne carnival ride as a metaphor for the opioid crisis) had just premiered at the Festival to ecstatic reviews, with The Times hailing it as 'one of the greatest operas of the century' and The Telegraph deeming it 'a defining opera for our time'.

Our topic of the day, though, is an earlier piece which recently received its world premiere recording courtesy of Houston Grand Opera: Breaking the Waves (2016), based on Lars von Trier's 1996 film about a vulnerable young woman living in an insular Scottish community whose husband encourages her to take a series of lovers after he is incapacitated in an industrial accident.

Missy spoke to us about the process of translating the story from screen to stage with her regular collaborator Royce Vavrek, why writing for the stage feels like home territory despite that fact that she didn't see her first opera until her late teens, the twentieth-century composers who fuelled her musical imagination for Breaking the Waves, and the upcoming premiere of Lincoln in the Bardo at the Metropolitan Opera...

Congratulations on the rave reviews for The Galloping Cure at the Edinburgh Festival! Have you had any downtime to enjoy other shows up there?

It’s been an intense, overwhelming week but I’ve made it to a couple of fringe and comedy shows and also the Scottish premiere of Tansy Davies’s The Passion of Mary Magdalene, which was so interesting. We always did think of Breaking the Waves as a Passion on some level, and certainly Tom Morris’s production (which was staged here at Edinburgh in 2019 and later recorded at Houston) approaches the opera from that perspective.

The themes of sacrifice and redemption certainly loom large in Breaking the Waves - how did you respond to Lars von Trier's perspective on that in his film?

The question of goodness is inherent in the movie and in the opera. I didn’t feel that the film presented Bess as a good person because of her sacrifice – I saw it as a story about what it means to be a good person in the first place. What are we to make of Bess? You can question and disagree with her behaviour, but does that mean she’s a bad person? What’s interesting about the story is that everyone is coming from a good place: her husband Jan (who just wants to set her free), her mother, the minister of the town, even the doctor who shames her for making sexual overtures. Apart from the two sadistic sailors who are psychotic and evil, every single character is trying to do what they think is best, and still terrible things happen. That’s very close to life. 

There's a similar dynamic at work in Janáček's Jenůfa, which popped into my head several times as I listened to Breaking the Waves...were you consciously inspired by any twentieth-century operas as you were writing?

Jenůfa was there in the back of my mind for sure. I saw it at the Met in 2008 and that scene where the villagers are condemning the Kostelnička and whispering her name really stood out to me, so I’ve paid a little homage to that in the scene when they’re coming out of church and hissing ‘Bess O’Neill! Bess O’Neill!’ over and over again. Janáček also has a way of setting text that feels very naturalistic because it’s so rooted in Czech speech patterns - I love that and tried to be guided by a similar principle in Breaking the Waves. And Britten was another big influence: there are such strong parallels between Peter Grimes and Breaking the Waves, with this insular coastal community being so suspicious of anyone who’s different, and perhaps you can hear that kinship in the choral writing…

There’s also a nod to Gaelic psalm singing, which is a particular style of vocal worship in the Highlands. I’m not an expert on traditional Scottish music by any means, but from what I heard and studied the minister will sing a phrase and the congregation will sing a response back in their own time. It’s not about lining up with each other and blending: it's about communing with God on an individual level. The result is this beautiful layered effect which sounds like a natural delay, and I used that in the church scenes. 

Your partnership with librettist Royce Vavrek has certainly stood the test of time - how did the two of you initially cross paths?

We met at Carnegie Hall back in 2009, when I went along to hear my friend David T. Little’s workshop presentation for his opera Dog Days. I heard this excerpt and thought ‘Who wrote this libretto? It's incredible!’ I met Royce afterwards and asked him to help me finish the libretto for my first opera, and that was that…here we are in 2026 preparing for the premiere of our sixth opera together! It was Royce who initially suggested that Breaking the Waves had operatic potential, and when I was Composer in Residence at Opera Philadelphia back in 2012 he said this would be a good opportunity to make it happen…we pitched it to them and they went for it! 

Was Breaking the Waves your first experience of transferring a story from screen to stage?

Yes! Our goal from the beginning wasn’t to recreate the film at all: we wanted to do our own version of it, and some of that happens automatically because opera is such a different medium. There’s so much potential for layering: the costumes, set design, text, music and orchestration can all be saying different things. In particular the music that underscores a character’s words can be undermining or contradicting them, which allows us to illuminate the psychological complexity of a story like Breaking the Waves in a way that just isn’t possible in a film. 

There’s also much more freedom of gaze in opera than there is in cinema. The film of Breaking the Waves is mostly shot with handheld cameras, so von Trier is really telling you where to look - but in the opera house the audience always have the full view of the stage and can make their own choices, which serves the story in a very interesting way. 

Did you have any contact with the team who worked on the von Trier film?

We had access to the original screen play, which is completely different from the actual film. There’s a lot of dialogue in the film that was created in the room while they were shooting, and there are scenes in the screenplay that were cut. We originally composed music for some of those cut scenes but ended up taking it out because on reflection it became really clear why von Trier cut them. So the opera is really a combination of the screenplay and the film itself – they’re two very distinct documents.

How did the opera evolve in the rehearsal room for that original production in 2016?

Kiera Duffy created the role of Bess, so she had a big impact on what the character eventually became: we did three or four workshops together with piano, plus a short orchestral one later in the process. There are some very challenging scenes for Bess, including explicit depictions of sex and graphic sexual violence, and Kiera, Sarah Brody (who performed the role in Paris and here at Edinburgh in 2019) and Lauren Snouffer (who sang it at Houston) all approached them with enormous courage. Having a dedicated intimacy coordinator on a production wasn’t really a thing when we premiered the piece back in 2016, but our Assistant Director handled that side of things with a lot of sensitivity and made sure that everyone felt safe and comfortable.

Who were the driving forces behind this recording of the Houston Grand Opera production?

The HGO team were so incredibly supportive of Breaking the Waves throughout the entire process – Khori Dastoor (the General Director and CEO) and Patrick Summers in particular were amazing, and I have so much admiration for their dedication and tirelessness. It’s not every company that would agree to make a recording of a new opera – it’s expensive and there’s a lot of logistics involved, but they felt that after ten years the piece deserved a recording. I’m so grateful to everyone involved, not least the amazing chorus: we all went out for drinks after the recording was in the can and they were still singing it! I was so touched to see and hear people being so joyful with my music, and I’ll never forget that.

Were you drawn to opera from childhood, or was it something that attracted you later in life?

I've always been writing narrative work, even when I was composing purely instrumental music. I wrote songs early in my career, but I didn’t compose a large-scale piece with voices until my first opera [Song from the Uproar, about the life of Swiss explorer Isabelle Eberhardt] when I was 27, which premiered when I was 31. After that I was completely hooked: there was this realisation that I’d been leaning towards this all my life in terms of how I think about music, because I’ve always focused on telling stories about human relationships. The ways we undermine or support each other are a huge part of opera, so when I finally wrote one it felt like coming home.

I started piano lessons when I was seven and began writing music when I was about ten. But I didn't see my first opera until I was nineteen: I took myself to see Wozzeck and sat there in the last seat in the back row having my mind blown! I studied voices very diligently when I first became interested in opera, and my three-year stint as Composer in Residence at Opera Philadelphia was a huge education.  I studied a lot of scores there and also took voice lessons, which was really instructive even though I can’t actually sing!

And I’ve learned so much from working with great dramaturgs like Cori Ellison [at Santa Fe Opera] and Fiona MacSherry who’s Head of Music here at Scottish Opera. They live and breathe opera, so they can make suggestions like ‘If you take that phrase down a step then the singer can breathe here’ or ‘If you tweak the underlay here, they’ll be able to create a smoother line’ - all these things that you can’t learn from studying books on composition!

What's coming up for you in the autumn?

The Galloping Cure goes to Norrlands Opera in Sweden next month, then San Francisco in the fall of 2027, then after that to the State Opera of South Australia, then on to Toronto. And we’re in discussions with additional US and European partners too…

Then it’s all hands to the pump for the premiere of our new opera Lincoln in the Bardo at the Metropolitan Opera in October! We’re doing a week of technical preparation at the end of August, then intensive staging and music rehearsals throughout September. We had a full workshop last summer with orchestra and singers and I really feel like I heard a pretty solid version of what the piece would be, which is rare. We have an incredible cast, including Christine Goerke and Anthony Roth Costanzo: they have such unique voices, so we created those characters specifically for them. I’m very excited and the singers are loving it!