Walking the Line: Emancipating the Complex Female Voice in Recent Operas by Missy Mazzoli

This interview canvassed Mazzoli’s recent works and her passion for setting narratives focusing on women in her operatic works, which include her first opera, Song from the Uproar (2012); Breaking the Waves (2016); Proving Up (2018); The Listeners (2021), and work-in-progress Lincoln in the Bardo. Underpinning her work in this genre are issues pertaining to the lives of women – real and fictional – of agency, “caught in impossible situations,” within the wider world and within the domestic sphere, stereotyping – within and beyond the operatic tradition, and including the role of charismatic leaders and their impact upon American society. The discussion also broaches the subject of the paucity in rates of commissioning contemporary women composers to write for the operatic medium, where Mazzoli shares her own approach to rectifying this situation, which includes a mentorship program, Luna Composition Lab, for female-identifying, non-binary and gender-nonconforming composers from thirteen to nineteen years old, to assist their music development during these formative years. Mazzoli offers a nuanced perspective on addressing gender inequity generally in the composition world, and notes her dealings with the reactions to her socio-politically provocative stances that underlie her work, commenting that, “if it’s worth doing, it should be hard.”