Missy Mazzoli's Breaking the Waves, the opera that made her name, brings Lars von Trier's story of faith and sacrifice to the London Coliseum.
Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves, the opera that made her name, opens at the London Coliseum in Covent Garden on Saturday 13 February 2027 and runs to Thursday 25 February.
Mazzoli is an American composer who came out of Brooklyn’s new-music scene. Royce Vavrek wrote the libretto from Lars von Trier’s 1996 film.
A young woman on a remote Scottish island marries an oil-rig worker who is paralysed in an accident. He asks her to take other men and describe them to him, and the community decides she is a whore.
The film divided its audience, and the opera keeps that difficulty. Mazzoli has said she wanted the writing to sound like weather, and the score sits between Britten and post-rock.
She has since written two more operas and runs a mentoring programme for women composers, a response to how few of them the houses were commissioning when she started.
English National Opera stages it as the third of four operas by living women in its season. It alternates with La traviata across February, so Verdi’s fallen woman and Mazzoli’s share one stage on consecutive nights.