Missy Mazzoli Debuts Lincoln in the Bardo at the Metropolitan Opera

Missy Mazzoli Debuts Lincoln in the Bardo at the Metropolitan Opera

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Bard College reports that Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli’s opera Lincoln in the Bardo — which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera on October 19 — has been profiled in The New Yorker, where critic Nathan Heller assesses the work’s music, its source material, and its place in Mazzoli’s career. Bard College notes that the opera is both Mazzoli’s first commission from the Met and the company’s first première by a woman, a milestone the profile treats as the capstone of a career that has moved from indie rock clubs to the opera house.

A Double First at the Met

Heller writes that “Mazzoli, once best known for her indie-electro band, Victoire, has emerged as one of our leading dramatic composers, and the opera,” adding that “Lincoln in the Bardo, written with her longtime librettist, Royce Vavrek, is both her first Met commission and the company’s first première by a woman.” That double distinction — a composer’s first commission and the institution’s first woman composer on the première stage — sits at the center of the profile’s argument about where Mazzoli now stands in American music.

Lincoln Among the Ghosts

The opera adapts George Saunders’s novel, placing Abraham Lincoln in a cemetery at the end of the Civil War as he grieves the death of his 11-year-old son and encounters the lingering ghosts who gather there. Stephanie Blythe, artistic director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program, is featured in the production, which Opera News had covered ahead of the New Yorker piece. The cemetery setting gives the story its strangeness: a president trapped between the living and the dead, surrounded by voices that will not let him leave.

Trained as a Death Doula

Heller draws a line from Mazzoli’s personal training to the opera’s atmosphere, writing that “Mazzoli, who has trained as a death doula, is known for burrowing deep into specific worlds,” and that “in Lincoln in the Bardo, she has produced a rich twenty-first-century score with musical shadows of both the Civil War era and the Halloween graveyard.”

Missy Mazzoli Debuts Lincoln in the Bardo at the Metropolitan Opera

Studio Doors Open at Bard

Mazzoli is a faculty member in the Bard Music Program and the Bard College Conservatory of Music, where she teaches classes on composition and new music and gives private studio instruction to composition majors. The conservatory’s stated mission is to provide the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music — a description that now applies as much to her Met première as to the students she trains.

More on Metropolitan Opera

Works & Process: The Metropolitan Opera: Lincoln in the Bardo by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek
Missy Mazzoli’s Lincoln in the Bardo: “How did it feel?” (Met Chorus)
Missy Mazzoli’s Lincoln in the Bardo: Creative Team Feature
Missy Mazzoli’s Lincoln in the Bardo: “All I ever asked for” (Anthony Roth Costanzo)

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