“Mazzoli, certainly and happily, continues to show herself a natural opera composer: Her music responds keenly to the story’s time and place as well as to its characters’ respective journeys...” — The Washington Post

“One of the greatest and most prolific composers of today” — Peter Gelb

The operas of Missy Mazzoli tell stories of private experience colliding with larger social forces. Together with librettist Royce Vavrek, Mazzoli draws upon a myriad of provocative and tender stories, by and in collaboration with the writers George Saunders, Karen Russell, Jordan Tannahill, and Lars von Trier.  The subjects of Mazzoli’s operas have shaped the evolution of her musical language.

Mazzoli and Vavrek's operatic catalogue moves from the intimate scale of Song from the Uproar and Proving Up to the expansive worlds of The Listeners, The Galloping Cure, and Lincoln in the Bardo. In honor of Missy Mazzoli's biggest season to date, with back-to-back world premieres at the Edinburgh Festival and the Metropolitan Opera, Wise Music is pleased to present a detailed look at the impressive body of work she has created over the past 15 years.

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Lincoln in the Bardo (2025)

Set in the aftermath of Willie Lincoln’s death, the opera unfolds in a graveyard populated by spirits who observe Abraham Lincoln’s grief. Like the George Saunders novel on which it is based, Lincoln in the Bardo evolves around an ensemble of character voices and shifting perspectives. With chorus, principal roles, and a full orchestral palette, the piece situates private mourning within a national landscape, asking how grief is carried, witnessed, and transformed by a community of the dead and the living.

Lincoln brings Mazzoli and Vavrek’s longtime dramatic partnership to the Metropolitan Opera, from October 19 to November 14, 2026. This Met commission marks the company's first-ever world premiere composed by a woman.

At the Met, the production is led by conductors Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Steven Osgood and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, with a cast including Peter Mattei, Christine Goerke, Janai Brugger, Stephanie Blythe, Anthony Roth Costanzo, and Ryan McKinny. The celebrated production team includes set designer Adam Rigg, choreographer Raja Feather Kelly and costumer designer Montana Levi Blanco. Santa Fe Opera is co-commissioner, and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music is a co-producer. 

FURTHER READING: The New York Times profiles Missy Mazzoli and her recent operas in “Pushing Opera Into the Future With Dance Beats, Kazoos and Abe Lincoln.”

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The Galloping Cure (2025)

In The Galloping Cure, Mazzoli and Vavrek explore themes of addiction, medical exploitation, and the predatory economies that gather around pain. Developed with author Karen Russell and drawing from Franz Kafka, the opera filters the opioid crisis through a surreal, darkly allegorical lens, centering a mysterious figure who offers a miraculous cure at a devastating cost. Director Tom Morris describes the work as “a lurid tale of the greed surrounding the tragedy of the opioid crisis,” 

Having premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2026, the Opera Ventures production reunited Scottish Opera with Mazzoli, Vavrek, and Morris following their acclaimed 2019 collaboration on Breaking the Waves. The score combines Mazzoli’s lyrical writing with driving, club-influenced rhythmic energy. The cast was led by acclaimed mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack, alongside Justin Austin and Susan Bullock. The international co-production brings together Opera Ventures Productions, Scottish Opera, NorrlandsOperan, Canadian Opera Company, San Francisco Opera, and State Opera of South Australia.

Writing for The Times, Richard Morrison describes The Galloping Cure as "an extraordinary parable about America's opioid scandal that makes King Lear look tame; a brilliantly evocative score, as theatrical as anything by Puccini, from a composer at the top of her game. Missy Mazzoli's new opera The Galloping Cure is all of these things.... it struck me as one of the most powerfully crafted pieces of music theatre to emerge this century."

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Complications in Sue — Scene 2 (2025)

Complications in Sue follows one woman’s life across ten decades, with each scene scored by a different composer. Mazzoli contributes one scene to the multi-composer opera, with a libretto by Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson. Presented by Opera Philadelphia in February 2026, the work stars celebrated cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond as Sue, with Zack Winokur and Raja Feather Kelly directing and Caren Levine conducting.

On August 21, 2026, Boyer College of Music and Dance (BCMG+D) Records released the world premiere recording of Complications in Sue. Captured live at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, the recording documents a production recognized by The New York Times in its “Best Classical Music and Opera of 2026.”

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The Listeners (2021)

“This is opera as it should be: thrilling on the level of drama, music and performance all at once, with Mazzoli’s lyrical melodies and unsettling harmonies at its core."

— The New York Times

Co-commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, Norwegian National Opera, and Lyric Opera of Chicago, The Listeners is Mazzoli and Vavrek’s fourth operatic collaboration. Based on an original story by Jordan Tannahill that has since been adapted for both film and television, the opera follows a middle-class mother in a southwestern U.S. suburb who begins to hear a mysterious high frequency “hum,” audible only to a select few. What begins as a search for explanation becomes an examination of the need for belonging and the ways charismatic leaders can exploit it.

Mazzoli has described the opera as a black comedy, finding absurdity and menace alike in the characters' ritualized search for meaning. Eystein Sandvik of NRK describes the opera as "a story about vulnerable people's struggle to cope with life, and how vulnerable we are to manipulation when the foundations of our lives collapse."

The Listeners premiered at Norwegian National Opera in September 2022, starring Nicole Heaston, with Ilan Volkov conducting Lileana Blain-Cruz's production. The production has since been mounted at Opera Philadelphia and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Lyric's performance, also starring Heaston and conducted by Enrique Mazzola, is released on PENTATONE October 9, 2026.

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Breaking the Waves (2016)

“Breaking the Waves is one of the most important operas of the 21st century, a work of incredible beauty, dramatic power, and profound lessons.”

— Patrick Summers

Based on Lars von Trier’s 1996 film, Breaking the Waves is one of Mazzoli’s most widely celebrated operas. Set in the Scottish Highlands in the early 1970s, it centers on Bess McNeill, a deeply religious young woman whose devotion to her husband Jan is tested after an accident leaves him paralyzed. As Bess attempts to reconcile Jan’s wishes with her faith, the expectations of her community and questions of sexuality, bodily autonomy, devotion, and self-sacrifice become increasingly entangled.

Both Mazzoli and Vavrek approach Bess with particular sympathy. Vavrek writes that he has “been haunted by the story since first seeing Lars von Trier’s film in 1997,” while Mazzoli has said she “chose to tell the story…because I feel it communicates an essential truth about my experience and that of many women I know.”

Opera News calls Breaking the Waves “among the best twenty-first-century American operas yet produced.” The New York Times observes that “it is not easy to find new operas that command attention, tell their story lucidly and create a powerful, permeating mood,” concluding that Breaking the Waves does so “with sensitivity and style.” The Wall Street Journal describes the work as “savage, heartbreaking and thoroughly original.”

Breaking the Waves received its world premiere at Opera Philadelphia in 2016, launching the company’s 2016–17 season at the Perelman Theater. Directed by James Darrah and conducted by Steven Osgood, the production starred Kiera Duffy as Bess McNeill and John Moore as Jan Nyman, with Eve Gigliotti as Dodo. The production went on to receive the 2017 Best New Opera Award from the Music Critics Association of North America, the inaugural presentation of the award. That same year it was shortlisted for the International Opera Award for Best World Premiere. In 2019, the opera received its European premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival in a new production directed by Tom Morris, a co-production of Opera Ventures, Scottish Opera, Houston Grand Opera, and Opéra Comique. That staging subsequently reached the Adelaide Festival (2020) Opéra Comique in Paris (2023) and Detroit Opera (2024). Separately, West Edge Opera (2019), Opera St. Gallen (2021), Vadstena Akademien (2022), Stadttheater Bremerhaven (2023), Opera Australia (2024) Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, and  Staatstheater Mainz (2026) have each present unique new production. English National Opera next offers a new production directed by Tinuke Craig in London (February 2027).

In 2025, Houston Grand Opera presented Morris’ production with Lauren Snouffer as Bess and Ryan McKinny as Jan. Those performances became the basis of the opera’s first commercial recording, released by Houston Grand Opera on August 7, 2026. Conducted by HGO Music Director Emeritus Patrick Summers, the recording features Snouffer and McKinny with the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra and Chorus.

FURTHER READING: Missy Mazzoli on Bess McNeill and the questions of misogyny surrounding Breaking the Waves.

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Proving Up (2018)

With Proving Up, Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek turn the mythology of the American Dream into chamber opera. Based on a short story by Karen Russell, the work follows the Zegners, a family of Nebraskan homesteaders struggling to satisfy the requirements of the Homestead Act and secure the deed to their land. A long harvest, a sod house dwelling, and a glass window become measures of belonging and prosperity, in a system where circumstances continually work against them. Mazzoli describes Russell’s story as “a surreal and haunting commentary on the American dream,” centered on a family that does everything “right” and is nevertheless undermined by forces beyond its control.

Mazzoli evokes the desolate prairie landscape with imagined fiddle tunes, Baroque gestures, scrap-metal percussion, harmonicas, a harpsichord, and seven suspended acoustic guitars, creating what she describes as music “unmoored from time.” The New Yorker praised Proving Up for the “lacerating power of Mazzoli’s writing.”

Commissioned by Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha, and Miller Theatre at Columbia University, Proving Up premiered at the Kennedy Center in 2018. The Washington Post called it “harrowing…powerful…a true opera of our time,” while The New York Times included the work among its Best Classical Music of 2018. Its stage life has continued, especially in the conservatory market where it has become extremely popular. Other productions of note have been staged by Pittsburgh Opera, and Ammolite Opera for the piece's Canadian premiere. PENTATONE released the world premiere recording in 2020. 

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Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt (2012)

“A visually and aurally ravishing chamber opera…a captivating multimedia spectacle.”

—The New York Times

Mazzoli’s first opera draws on the journals and life of Isabelle Eberhardt, the Swiss-born writer and explorer who rejected European convention for a nomadic life in North Africa. Rather than construct a conventional biography, Mazzoli and co-librettist Royce Vavrek use Eberhardt’s writings as the basis for an interior portrait of independence, love, loss, and self-invention. The 75-minute work brings mezzo-soprano and five-voice ensemble together with flute, clarinet, piano, electric guitar, double bass, electronics, and multimedia.

Mazzoli wanted the opera to be “more of a personal response to her life than a detailed retelling of her story.” She was drawn to the ways Eberhardt struggled to define herself as an independent woman while maintaining her freedom and falling deeply in love.

The world premiere was commissioned and produced by Beth Morrison Projects at The Kitchen in New York on February 24, 2012, with mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer and NOW Ensemble. The work subsequently received its West Coast premiere with LA Opera in 2015 and has since been produced by Milwaukee Opera Theatre, Chautauqua Opera, Chicago Fringe Opera, Cincinnati Opera, and the Croatian National Theatre. In 2026, Song from the Uproar received its Finnish premiere at the Helsinki Contemporary Opera Festival.

The original cast recording, featuring Fischer, NOW Ensemble, and conductor Steven Osgood, was released by New Amsterdam Records in November 2012.

 

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A Flourish of Green (2013)

Based on Day Four, Story 5 of Boccaccio's Decameron, A Flourish of Green distills love, deception, and transformation into a compact seven minutes of operatic drama. With a libretto by award-winning librettist Mark Campbell, its intimate scale and vivid theatricality make it an attractive entry point for emerging singers and small ensembles.

Salt (2012)

Salt was created as part of Elsewhere, a “Cello Opera” born from a collaboration between cellist Maya Beiser and theater director Robert Woodruff. Bringing together compositions by Mazzoli, Eve Beglarian, and Michael Gordon, the triptych reimagines the biblical story of Lot’s wife through an imaginative and psychological lens. Commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts, the piece received its world-premiere production by Beth Morrison Projects in October 2012.

Continue exploring Missy Mazzoli’s music through her full catalogue or read her latest news. For more information about Missy Mazzoli and her works, please contact Peggy Monastra.