PHILADELPHIA — En route from Oslo to Philadelphia, Missy Mazzoli’s The Listeners transformed from an earnest, bitter-pill opera about toxic modern America into something that’s still pungent with dark comic edges. How many times can an operatic voice sing the f-word before artificiality sets in, vibrato takes over, and the audience starts tittering?
The opera’s complexion definitely brightened at Opera Philadelphia’s U.S. premiere Sept. 25 at the Academy of Music, with its story about southwestern U.S. suburbanites joining cults and having nervous breakdowns feeling more current than at the world-premiered video stream in 2023 from the Norwegian National Opera. The Oslo audience seemed to be contemplating the opera’s implications at the final curtain. In Philadelphia, the back-handed levity of sung American street language yielded a better balance of light and shade, and helped generate the rock-concert enthusiasm that came with seeing our fears reflected onstage.
In both venues, The Listeners emerged as the best yet from Mazzoli’s partnership with librettist Royce Vavrek, filling the stage with 22 characters, ample stage time to explore their psychology, and many tools to do so. Starting with a deep-sounding orchestral rumble with simultaneous time-stretching rhythms at odds with each other, the opera tapped into one’s dread of unseen forces that everyday people neither deserve nor understand: A buzzing inside the ears — somewhere between tinnitus, water torture, and an electric drill — is embedding itself into random characters with little rhyme or reason.
All walks of life are left baffled, sleep-deprived, and shamed by those who don’t hear it. They act out, cross moral and social boundaries, and are driven to do anything for relief — unfolding over Adam Rigg’s realistic sets with facial closeups on large video screens, all mixing deftly with a sense of normality projected by Lileana Blane-Cruz’s functional staging.
While Mazzoli’s much-produced Breaking the Waves was about one person’s singular fatal journey, this opera dramatizes a collective journey with multiple routes, creating broader possibilities of identification. You may not like the characters, but you know them. Instead of dramatizing characters coping with exterior catastrophe, this opera’s conflict (inspired by the original Jordan Tannahill story) is completely interior. The calls are coming from inside the house (to quote any number of slasher movies), but only a few actually hear them. A dynamic similar to drug addiction?
The starting point is a female school teacher and a strapping male student who realize they both hear the buzz and band together — no matter how bad it looks to the outside world — and discover a cult of similarly afflicted people on line. The cult has a ritual of members confessing their sins on video screens. A webcast shows the cult presenting itself to the world with snarky chat comments along the right margin. A demonic cult leader has emerged with a harem of secretaries. A TV news commentator acts as a narrator.
More than other Mazzoli operas, this one has a conceptual template in Richard Strauss. Her harmonic language is nothing like Strauss, but she employs a broad orchestral canvas framed by open-ended motifs that guide and shape any given scene. The opera’s hallmark is the crowd scenes. Occasionally, one was reminded of storm choruses from Porgy and Bess. But more than Gershwin, Mazzoli’s choral writing reveals evolving, detailed group-wide viewpoints. Solo vocal lines — eloquently polytonal with heightened exclamations prompted by Vavrek’s anything-but-stylized libretto — project conflicting emotions among individual characters. Through-composed solo arias tended to be too long by a third, not exactly running out of steam but making strong points and then elaborating unnecessarily.
Rhetoric, however, tells only half the story. Thanks to Mazzoli’s powers of suggestion, you don’t need to hear the inner buzz to feel its effects amid the music’s nervous rhythms. The composer’s keen sense of orchestral color goes straight to the dramatic soul of any situation. That was more apparent in Oslo, where the metallic glisten of the sonorities and harmonic thunderclaps were more pronounced. In contrast, Philadelphia’s music director, Corrado Rovaris, took a more lyrical approach that emphasized the forward motion of any scene. As a result, the orchestration melded more seamlessly when audience-enveloping electronic washes of sound arrived at the end of each act.
The Academy of Music acoustics didn’t help the singers. Vocal lines that serve the words well had to be projected with strenuousness that disguised their dramatic eloquence. Nonetheless, nearly all the major singers were exactly what was needed. In the central role of Claire, Nicole Heaston’s depth of vocal color was a reminder of the humanity that lay beyond her character’s torment. Troy Cook as her husband and Kevin Burdette as the cult leader represented polar opposite personalities, the former coping questionably with the unknown and the latter knowing exactly how to get what he wants. Another counterbalance was represented by Claire’s cynical daughter Ashley (with a darker-than-dark portrayal by Lindsay Reynolds) and the cult leader’s manically cheerful secretary Angela (played mostly for laughs by Rehanna Thelwell), but both defining an everyday world from which one would want to flee.
Vavrek’s tendency to add extra characters in Act II isn’t the tidiest way to go, but it’s hard to begrudge that when the music for the unhinged cult member Dillon (compellingly portrayed by John Moore, singing 13 “f” bombs) is some of the best in the opera. However, reasons for the occasional appearances of a non-singing Coyote (a female dancer impersonating an animal) were lost on me.
Will The Listeners have a life beyond its topicality? Or — like Thomas Adès’ 1995 Powder Her Face — will it fade into the distance amid changing social mores? One thing is certain: The Listeners is far more likely to enter the larger opera world thanks to its finding the right audience at its U.S. premiere. The catalyst was the company’s new general director, Anthony Roth Costanzo, creating a policy of picking your ticket price (as low as $11). The house was full, though exactly how that translated into receptivity for this particular opera is one of those fortunate marketing mysteries.
