Fact: Missy Mazzoli
Born: 1980 in Lansdale, Pennsylvania.
Occupation: Composer.
Education: Bachelor’s degree at Boston University College of Fine Arts, master’s degree at the Yale School of Music and further studies at the Royal Winter Garden in The Hague.
Current with: The opera set by Lars von Trier “Breaking the waves” with libretto written by Royce Vavrek. The opera was nominated for “Best World Premiere” at the 2017 International Opera Awards and won the 2017 Music Critics Association of North America “Best New Opera” award.
“Breaking the Waves” has its Scandinavian premiere on July 22 at Vadstena Castle under the direction of Ylva Kihlberg.
“Breaking the waves” won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996 and was met with strong reactions after its premiere. The American composer Missy Mazzoli, who has made the opera performance based on the film, remembers being deeply affected when she saw it.
— Even before I did the revision, I felt a strong attraction to all the psychological layers in von Trier’s work. I have been living with “Breaking the waves” for over a decade now. I am constantly discovering new things with these characters, says Mazzoli, who wrote the opera in 2016.
Danish auteur Lars von Trier’s drama depicts a small Calvinist community on a Scottish island, where oil worker Jan (Stellan Skarsgård) and young woman Bess (Emily Watson) fall in love. After Jan is paralyzed in an accident, he asks Bess to meet new lovers and then tell him about her sexual experiences. This leads to Bess being thrown out of the religious community and eventually raped and killed by a violent man.
“Told from a female perspective”
Missy Mazzoli says she has stayed true to Von Trier’s vision yet made the story her own.
— The big difference is that I tell this more from a woman’s perspective. I see it as a story about a woman in an impossible situation. She is surrounded by people trying to tell her what to do and everyone is saying different things, says Missy Mazzoli.
The film has close-up photography in an almost documentary style. According to Missy Mazzoli, opera’s superpower is another ability to subtext. The words can say one thing, but the music communicates something totally different, and the lighting something else.
— There are so many possibilities to portray someone’s inner world. The opera “Breaking the waves” is very different from the film, just on the virtues of the genre, says Mazzoli.
Criticizes the criticism
The film was accused of reinforcing the clichéd image of female martyrdom, but Mazzoli believes that such criticism is superficial.
— Bess has agency and drives the whole story forward. I also tried to portray that in the music, such as her leading duets, says Mazzoli.
She believes that Bess (in the opera played by Josefine Mindus) has often been misunderstood as mentally deficient.
— Almost everyone else resorts to violence or shouts. Their tools are much blunter but Bess is actually the only person who stands by her moral convictions. There is a strength and an intelligence there that the other characters don’t have.
Mazzoli has latched onto von Trier’s idea: everyone in the story acts out of goodness.
— For me, it undermines the “poor woman being crushed by a group of men” interpretation. It’s not interesting, but if all these people, including her mother and mother-in-law, are trying to act from a place of pure goodness – but the world won’t allow it, that’s very interesting to me, says Mazzoli.
Jan’s motivation a mystery
TT: Can you argue that Jan (Jonah Spungin in the opera set) also sacrifices himself, because he wants Bess to have a sexual life that he can no longer offer her?
— The question of Jan’s motivation is the central unsolved mystery. We worked very hard in the opera not to make it clear. I want the audience to walk away saying “I don’t know what his intentions were”. I think they come from pure goodness, but he’s a man in his 70s who doesn’t have an emotionally nuanced palette. He’s doing what he thinks is best for her and it’s a huge sacrifice for him.
Religion and faith also play a big role. In the opera, Bess’s mother sings an aria about “without the church you are nothing” and after her death, Bess is denied a funeral because she sinned. At one point, Bess stands up to the men of the church, saying “you can’t love a word, you can only love a person”. Nevertheless, Mazzoli does not want to describe sens morality as atheistic.
— The story has an aspect of rebellion against power, but also a kind of supernatural idea that love survives everything, says Missy Mazzoli.
The American composer Missy Mazzoli’s opera performance of Lars von Trier’s film “Breaking the waves” has received good reviews since it was staged for the first time in 2016. On July 22, it will have its Swedish premiere at Vadstena Castle.