When Missy Mazzoli’s best friend and collaborator, the librettist Royce Vavrek, first suggested turning Danish director Lars von Trier’s 1996 film Breaking the Waves into an opera, she was wary. “It’s a great film – I didn’t want to create something that was less than that,” the American composer says. “I really had to get to the point where I realised .
.. that I had the power, just by virtue of the difference in genre, to create a very different experience.
” That initial hesitation is understandable: von Trier is one of arthouse cinema’s most divisive directors, and Breaking the Waves is a violent, harrowing film. Emily Watson as Bess in a scene from Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves. It follows Bess, a young woman in a small Calvinist community in 1970s Scotland, who goes to increasingly brutal lengths to please her husband, Jan.
Depending on who you ask, it’s brilliant, subversive cinema highlighting the oppressive nature of patriarchy and religion, or misogynistic, misanthropic perversion. Mazzoli and Vavrek’s version has taken on a life of its own. Since premiering in 2016, Breaking the Waves has become one of contemporary opera’s most talked-about productions.
Mazzoli herself is a trailblazer in opera and modern classical music – dubbed the “post-millennial Mozart” by Time Out New York, she was one of the first women to be commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera House. One of the most essential changes is the use of music – othe.