CFA Alumni

Can Missy Mazzoli Help Reinvent Opera in America?

CFA alum, composer, and Grammy nominee is working on a major commission from the Metropolitan Opera—and on widening the path for women in the field

This article was first published in Bostonia on March 25, 2025. By Joel Brown. Photos by Chris Sorensen

Opera companies battling pandemic losses, audience and donor declines, and competition from streaming media need to find new ways to sustain themselves, Peter Gelb wrote in the New York Times, and that starts on the stage.

Maybe he had that in mind back in 2018, when he commissioned composer Missy Mazzoli to write a new opera for the Met. Mazzoli (CFA’02) seems likely to be a prominent player in opera’s future in America after what anyone would call a pretty good 2024.

Start with the New Yorker’s rave review of the American premiere of her “seductively nightmarish” and distinctly contemporary opera The Listeners, in which critic Alex Ross called her a “magician of the orchestra.”

Then there was the news that Mazzoli was one of two recipients of the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize for New Music at the New York Philharmonic, recognizing “extraordinary artistic endeavors in the field of new music” with $200,000 and a commission for a work to premiere in 2027.

She even made her debut on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert earlier in the year, briefly joining in on keyboard as violinist Jennifer Koh played pieces Mazzoli has written for her during their long friendship.

All this while she edited her opera Lincoln in the Bardo, her commission from the Metropolitan Opera based on George Saunders’ acclaimed novel, set to debut there in 2026; it’s another installment of her ongoing collaboration with Pulitzer Prize–winning librettist Royce Vavrek.

That’s a lot of winning, especially for a woman in classical music, a field often dominated by dead white men.

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