Mazzoli Breaks the Waves

I attended Missy Mazzoli's opera Breaking the Waves last night at the NYU Skirball Center.  It was outstanding. Everything about it was top notch: the music, the libretto, the set, the direction, the singers. 

The set, designed by Adam Rigg was a jumble of crisscrossing planks that filled a half of the stage, but it served ingeniously now as a promontory overlooking the sea, now as the oil rig, now as a hospital room; and the screen projections for different loci were very effective, too, especially the scene of the accident at the rig and the black smears that gradually filled the screens in the later scenes of the heroine’s behavioral degradation. The chorus, sometimes in black as churchmen, moved and sang menacingly, and their quick change to act the men at the rig and later as sex predators was also impressive; and the chorus members, highly individualized, registered as memorable characters.  James Darrah’s direction expertly blocked and paced the singers up and down the rickety planks. The libretto by Royce Vavrek, written in short phrases and, often repeated, were clear and easily heard.  Most of all, Mazzoli’s music was hauntingly expressive of intense and often complex emotions, dramatic at every turn.  The singers were all good, John Moore as Jan, certainly, but most of all the soprano Keira Duffy sang the difficult role beautifully; her total nudity, still shocking to some, may foretell a future, as Joyce's prose, once criminalized, no longer disturbs anyone today. 

The film by Lars von Trier tells a horrendous story about Bess, a strictly spiritual woman, who falls in love with Jan, an oilman; when he returns from an accident, totally paralyzed, she accuses herself and puts in action Jan’s order to go and have sex elsewhere, our of sheer increasing sense of guilt.  Mazzoli’s opera clarified the drama and powerfully conveyed the devastating effect on the two lovers rendered by the hypocritical church and the accident at the off-shore oil rig and ultimately the ironically twisted theme of Omnia vincit Amor.  As some critics claimed, this was certainly the best contemporary opera I had seen this year. 

Two years ago, I heard Mazzoli’s works in the Composer Portraits series at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre.  The program included the aria “His Name is John” from Breaking the Waves.  She was briefly interviewed during the program and shone in her articulate intelligence.  But the work of hers that I found especially impressive was “Death Valley Junction” from 2010, which depicted the place of that name on the border between Nevada and California, inhabited by three people, a home to eccentric Marta Beckett, “the woman who resurrected and repaired the crumbling opera house in the late 1960s and performed one-woman shows there every week until her retirement in 2012 at age 87. ”