Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek's Breaking the Waves plays the London Coliseum from 13 to 25 February 2027.
Missy Mazzoli is an American composer who came out of Brooklyn’s new-music scene rather than a conservatoire opera department, and Breaking the Waves, from 2016, is the piece that made her reputation. 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, he is paralysed in an accident, and he asks her to take other men and describe them to him. The community decides she is a whore. The film divided everyone who saw it; the opera keeps the difficulty rather than smoothing it, and the score sits somewhere between Britten and post-rock.
Mazzoli has said she wanted the writing to sound like weather, and the orchestra behaves accordingly, in slabs and gusts rather than lines. Mazzoli has since written two more operas and runs a mentoring programme for women composers, which is a direct response to how few of them the houses were commissioning when she started.
English National Opera gives it at the London Coliseum from Saturday 13 to Thursday 25 February 2027. It is the third of four operas by living women in the house’s season, and it alternates with La traviata in the same room across February — Verdi’s fallen woman and Mazzoli’s on the same stage on consecutive nights, a hundred and seventy years apart and judged by their neighbours in exactly the same terms.