PERSPECTIVE — What comes after the great reviews and awards? That question came to mind in July when the Music Critics Association of North America announced its Best New Opera Award, which the organization has given out annually since 2017. As Rene Orth, composer of this year’s winner, 10 Days in a Madhouse, said in an interview: “Awards and positive reviews are a gratifying pat on the back, but the ultimate goal is to have a bigger impact and more performances. That’s what I care about.”
To find the answer, I researched the post-premiere performance history of each of the seven MCANA award recipients, including conversations with either the composer or librettist — or, in the case of Sweet Land, Yuval Sharon, who conceived, produced, and co-directed that work. They filled me in on the operas’ track records, as well as their other projects.
Here’s the list of winners:
2017: Breaking the Waves by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek; 2018: The Wake World by David Hertzberg; 2019: p r i s m by Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins; 2020: Blue by Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson; 2021: Sweet Land by Raven Chacon, Du Yun, Aja Couchois Duncan, and Douglas Kearney; 2022: No award (due to pandemic); 2023: R.U.R. A Torrent of Light by Nicole Lizée and Nicolas Billon; 2024: 10 Days in a Madhouse by Rene Orth and Hannah Moscovitch.
Although seven works constitute a small sample size, their collective stories provide a telling snapshot of the brave new opera world; they also represent a consistent critical point of view. The five judges for the award have been the same throughout its history. They are co-chairs Heidi Waleson, opera critic of the Wall Street Journal, and George Loomis, contributor to Musical America, Opera, and the Financial Times; Arthur Kaptainis, contributor to Ludwig van Toronto and former music critic of the Montreal Gazette; John Rockwell, former critic and arts editor with The New York Times and now correspondent for Opera and Musical America; and Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker.
If there has been a trend to the judges’ taste, it runs to experimental works that push operatic boundaries. Women composers and librettists are well represented among the award winners. Special recognition goes to Opera Philadelphia, responsible for the premieres of three winners: Breaking the Waves, The Wake World, and 10 Days in a Madhouse.
Two of the MCANA award winners have gone on to have substantial success: Breaking the Waves and Blue have each had numerous productions, and the careers of their creators are thriving. Composers Tesori and Mazzoli both have operas commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, with Tesori’s Grounded opening the Met’s 2024-25 season on Sept. 23 and Mazzoli and librettist Vavrek’s Lincoln in the Bardo set to be performed by the company in the 2026-27 season. On Broadway, Tesori’s Kimberly Akimbo won five 2023 Tony Awards. The U.S. premiere of Mazzoli’s The Listeners will run Sept. 25-29 at Opera Philadelphia.
Since its 2016 premiere, Breaking the Waves has been performed by at least a dozen companies in the United States, Australia, Switzerland, France, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. “I’ve seen all the productions except for West Edge Opera (in Berkeley, Calif.) in the summer of 2019,” Mazzoli said. “I couldn’t be there since we were in rehearsals for the Edinburgh International Festival production, which then traveled to Adelaide, Australia.”
Breaking the Waves is about a woman from the north of Scotland who falls in love with an offshore oil-rig worker; tragic, lurid, violent complications ensue. Originally a chamber opera, with a 17-piece orchestra in Philadelphia, it was expanded for Edinburgh, with a second version whose orchestration includes more strings and brass. Both scores are available for performance, and the Edinburgh version has been used in larger venues, such as the Detroit Opera production in April 2024. Houston Grand Opera will stage it in April 2025.
Oddly, given the extensive track record of Breaking the Waves, a commercial recording of the full opera has not been made. “It’s such a difficult, challenging work that I never expected it to have so many performances around the world and such widespread appeal,” Mazzoli said. “It is my most successful work, and the only way to hear it now is live. The one thing missing is a recording.”
Mazzoli’s composing has been supported by consortium commissions, which guarantee multiple presentations of the operas. Her latest is The Galloping Cure, with a libretto by Vavrek, which transplants a Kafka short story, “A Country Doctor,” to the opioid crisis. Slated to premiere in 2026, it was co-commissioned by Scottish Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Sweden’s Norrlandsoperan. “In the last five years, all of my commissions have started in Europe,” she said. “There has been less commissioning of new work in the U.S.”
By the end of this year, 10 opera companies in the U.S. and Europe will have performed Blue, with librettist Tazewell Thompson directing seven of those productions, including the Glimmerglass Festival premiere in 2019. Thompson’s direction of the work continues with a Lyric Opera of Chicago engagement Nov. 16-Dec. 1. The cast features bass Kevin Kellogg, who has sung the leading role of the Father in every production so far but one.
Blue tells the story of a Black family whose teenage son is killed by a white police officer. “It premiered before the murder of George Floyd, and it has had productions in cities with cases where police killed Black men, such as Chicago,” Thompson said. “Unfortunately, the story of an unarmed Black boy being shot by a cop has no diminishing shelf life, no expiration date.”
Due to the pandemic, Thompson sees a slowdown in the staging of new work. “So many regional opera companies have suffered a great deal economically,” he said. “They are returning to the war horses: Butterfly and Bohème and Traviata. I think Blue will always bring in Black audiences and the regular opera audience who want to experience this story of a family struck by unimaginable tragedy.”
Thompson has created a work called Jubilee and is directing the premiere Oct. 12-26 at Seattle Opera. It is about the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who introduced African American spirituals to a global audience after the Civil War.
Of all the MCANA award winners, p r i s m was the most decorated, with composer Ellen Reid also winning the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her score to the harrowing drama on PTSD from sexual assault. Yet the opera, produced by Beth Morrison Projects, received only two subsequent presentations after its world premiere by LA Opera in 2018. Both came the following year, at New York City’s Prototype Festival and a tour to São Paulo, Brazil.
In 2020, p r i s m was one day away from its opening night at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, when the engagement was canceled as the pandemic caused performing arts venues around the U.S. to shut down. “The life of p r i s m was definitely cut short by Covid,” librettist Roxie Perkins said. “The pandemic had such a huge impact on arts organizations around the world and their willingness to take on riskier projects. Now it feels as if things are opening up with more opportunities for works like ours.” On Oct. 9, p r i s m will have its European premiere at Theater Freiburg in Baden-Württemberg, Germany.
In March, The Shell Trial, an opera on climate change with music by Reid and libretto by Perkins, received its world premiere by Dutch National Opera. The three-act work was adapted from a Dutch play about a 2021 court case in which the oil giant was ordered to reduce its carbon emissions by 2030. Co-commissioners include Opera Philadelphia and Austria’s Bregenz Festival.
Four MCANA opera award winners have not been staged since their premieres: The Wake World, Sweet Land, R.U.R. A Torrent of Light, and 10 Days in a Madhouse. The chief reason has been the pandemic and its lingering effects, but with three of them essentially being chamber operas, the lack of companies with small-scale alternative venues and programming intended to cultivate an audience for new music may also be a factor.
Sweet Land‘s 2020 premiere by The Industry was curtailed by the Covid shutdown. The opera has not been performed live since then, despite boasting music by a pair of Pulitzer Prize winners, Du Yun and Raven Chacon. It is perhaps the most logistically unwieldy of the award winners, a site-specific historical pageant on the first meeting of European settlers and Indigenous people, performed in a Los Angeles park by a large cast.
“We were hyper-focused on putting it on in L.A. in that space. Any additional presentation of it would be an uphill battle,” said Sharon, founding artistic director of The Industry. “Anything is possible, but there is no future production of Sweet Land on the horizon.” Now he is artistic director of Detroit Opera, which has performed Blue — done outdoors to accommodate pandemic protocol — and Breaking the Waves during his tenure. For The Industry, he directed the premiere in June of The Comet/Poppea with Sweet Land co-librettist Douglas Kearney writing the libretto for the George Lewis score.
Sharon, the first American to direct at Bayreuth, is the opera world’s ultimate multi-tasker. In August, it was announced that he is bringing his Wagnerian expertise to the Met, directing Tristan und Isolde for the company in the 2025-26 season, followed by his staging of the Ring, starting in 2027-28. This month, his first book, A New Philosophy of Opera, was published.
The Wake World, by David Hertzberg, is another site-specific work, with Opera Philadelphia setting its Aleister Crowley occult fantasy in galleries of the Barnes Foundation in 2017. “It was very exciting to see it in the Barnes, but the soul of the work is very untethered to that context,” said Hertzberg, author of both score and text. “There was a plan for a proscenium production that was derailed by Covid.”
Although Wake World has not had a second production, it did yield a superb two-CD recording. “Before Covid shut everything down, I was lucky to make a studio recording on John Zorn’s Tzadik label,” Hertzberg said. “It was an extraordinary opportunity to sculpt the sound as sensuously as I could. I’m hopeful that having this recording out there will lead to more performances.”
Lately, Hertzberg has been working on a four-act opera commissioned by The Industry called Grand Hotel. “It’s a mammoth, sprawling beast, like a Hollywood Ring cycle,” he said. “I wrote the libretto over a long period of time. It’s where my work has been headed.”
Neither of the most recent award winners, R.U.R. A Torrent of Light and 10 Days in a Madhouse, have been around long enough to forge a post-premiere presence, given the long lead time it takes for opera companies to put together a season. There is some synchronicity between the two works, as R.U.R. was premiered in 2022 by Toronto’s Tapestry Opera, which co-commissioned 10 Days along with Opera Philadelphia, where it had its premiere the next year. The openings of both were delayed by several years because of the pandemic.
Composer Nicole Lizée deploys a blend of traditional and unorthodox instrumentation, lyrical and avant-garde singing, and plenty of technology in her sci-fi score for R.U.R., which takes place in a future of artificial intelligence run amok. The Tapestry production was notable for its use of innovative sound, lighting, and visual design, such as “wearable tech” in the robot costumes.
“We got lucky there, coming out when the obsession with A.I. was just starting,” librettist Nicolas Billon said. “Our hope is that the opera will find an audience beyond the premiere because it’s about something people are really interested in.”
In Billon’s view, R.U.R. doesn’t need a high-tech staging: “I don’t think it requires a lot of razzle-dazzle. It would be totally possible to do it with a steampunk flavor. The space we originally did it in was quite intimate, but I also think it could work well in a 1,000-seat theater. It feels like an opera you could do at several different budget levels.”
Tapestry’s performance of 10 Days in a Madhouse is not yet scheduled. When it does happen, composer Rene Orth is not inclined to make revisions in her opera about pioneering 19th-century journalist Nellie Bly’s expose of conditions in a women’s asylum. “For five years I lived and dreamed this piece,” she said. “I wrote it and rewrote it, and 99% of it feels right. I don’t think I’d change anything, except for maybe a few electronic things in the first scene.”
In the Opera Philadelphia premiere of 10 Days, Nellie was sung by soprano Kiera Duffy, who also had the leading role as Bess McNeill seven years earlier in the premiere by the same company of Breaking the Waves.
“This is a game that’s new to me,” Orth said of seeking more productions for her opera. “I self-publish, so I don’t have a big publisher constantly vouching for my work. I’m working on grants for an audio recording because I think that would make the opera more accessible for future programming. I guess time will tell. Patience and persistence are key.”
