Strange Beautiful Music: HGO’s spring operas speak powerfully to each other
Our two final operas of this HGO season are both towering monuments to personal conflicts rendered as art, two operas that are profound Odyssean journey operas—and both are epics of spirituality. This spring, we present the provocative, beautiful, and disturbing Breaking the Waves, composed just under a decade ago, and the majestic medieval romance Tannhäuser, composed by Wagner in 1845, based on a 13th-century legend. What on earth could these two disparate works have to say to each other and to us here now, a quarter of the way into the 21st century? Quite a lot, I think.
Rarely have two such diverse operas sat together with such thematic crossover.
Tannhäuser, the title character of Wagner’s opera, is a medieval knight locked between two worlds—Wartburg and Venusberg. Wartburg is a real place near the German town of Eisenach, which in medieval literature was a world of spirituality, the location of a famous song contest, and representative in this opera of the redemptive love of a faithful woman, Elisabeth. The Venusberg is a mythical place of hedonistic pleasure and indulgence, the world of the siren Venus. We meet Tannhäuser just at the height of his pleasures with Venus, and his rejection and guilt of that pleasure, with Venus attempting to seduce him into staying with her, which he rejects.
It is announced that the theme of the Wartburg song contest is to be: “Can You Explain the Nature of Love?” Elisabeth, hoping to revive her love for Tannhäuser, first greets the hall of song with great joy, then anxiously awaits Tannhäuser’s song, only to find that he sings about Venus, horrifying everyone, because his song is an admission of sin. The crowd grows violent toward him, saved only by Elisabeth, who explains that sins can find atonement. His life spared, Tannhäuser is exiled and ordered to join a band of pilgrims bound for Rome. The extraordinary third act of the opera is focused on Tannhäuser’s pilgrimage and what is at stake for various people within it. Elisabeth prays for him, but her prayers seem to foretell her own death. Wolfram, also in love with Elisabeth, doubts that Tannhäuser will find absolution. Wolfram sings a prayer on the Evening Star for her.
Tannhäuser returns from Rome, unabsolved and again seeking the hedonistic comforts of Venus. The pope has told him that just as his own staff will no longer sprout leaves, so is Tannhäuser’s soul unredeemable. Wolfram says the one word that he knows will change Tannhäuser’s heart: Elisabeth. Tannhäuser repeats her name, but it is too late—Elisabeth is dead, and the sight of her on a bier takes Tannhäuser’s life as well. The pilgrims with whom Tannhäuser ventured to Rome return, bearing a staff that is sprouting new life. They declare a miracle as Tannhäuser and Elisabeth enter into eternal life together. Love triumphs in Tannhäuser, but love is a destructive force in all of the remaining Wagner operas.
Breaking the Waves is set in the mid-1970s on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, in a small religious community so starkly observant that they have removed the local church bells and thrown them in the sea, thinking them too evocative and sensual. We immediately meet Bess McNeill, a grown woman with a childlike sensibility, which is possibly the result of some type of neurodivergence or even a learning disorder—we never know. Bess falls in love with the oil-rigger Jan, marries him, and experiences an extreme level of sexual enlightenment with him.
Jan, upon returning to the oil rig after their wedding, has a paralyzing accident which Bess somehow believes is her fault. Jan, knowing he will never again be able to be intimate with his wife, asks her to have sex with other men and report the encounters back to him as a way of remaining intimate with her. The idea, of course, shocks her, but she feels she must obey him to fulfill her vows. Indeed, when Bess has sexual relations with one particular man, Jan’s health stabilizes, so she sets out on a series of sexual liaisons, each of which increases in danger and extremity, and this ruins her reputation in their small and conservative community.
Wandering onto a large commercial ship, she is brutally raped, and she dies just as her husband is awakening from a successful surgery that has partially restored him to health. The religious community agrees to give her a funeral, but insists that her soul is consigned to hell. Unwilling to accept this, Jan steals her body before she is buried, and puts her soul in the sea, as within the sound of the breaking waves we hear the drowned church bells.
Tannhäuser is one of the great, majestic, romantic, grand operas, requiring huge forces of the highest accomplishment, with a redemptive and grand ending. What opera, I ask you, ends so thrillingly as does Tannhäuser? It is an expansive and lyrical vision–not for what our lives might be, but how we might feel at moments of spiritual distress or joy. For all of its richness, Tannhäuser is ultimately a celebration of the power of singing, because music is an integral part of its plot, and right at the heart of a spiritual quest. The song contest in Tannhäuser is a metaphor for the tests we all face in life, and singing is the life force not only of the opera, but of the story within the opera. For such a sublime evocation of music itself in an opera, one would have to go back to the scene near the end of Mozart’s Magic Flute where, guided by the power of music, Tamino and Pamina safely pass through trials of water and fire.
Breaking the Waves is a chamber opera with one of the most disturbing and enigmatic stories ever put on the operatic stage. As a story, it is many things below the surface of its marvelously evocative title. It is an allegory of fundamentalism, of what happens when beliefs are not tempered by doubt, but it also goes much more graphically into the moral questions posed by Tannhäuser: what are the links between sexuality and spirituality, which are so often seen as polar opposites, each policing the other? In Tannhäuser, religious ecstasy is at war with sensuality; in Breaking the Waves, they are fused in Bess’s mind to the point of traumatic danger. What we see in these two operas are the pre- and post-Freudian mind played out in two separate works of art that are mirrors of each other.
Any artist’s place in cultural history should be viewed from three directions: by their influences, by the merits of their own works, and by the ones who came in their wake, the ones they influenced. Tannhäuser, in particular, is perhaps best understood in the context of these three views.
Wagner’s chosen influences were numerous: Beethoven; Goethe; Schiller; Carl Maria von Weber, especially his opera Der Freischütz; a host of philosophers; the Italian composer Vincenzo Bellini, whose operas Wagner delighted in conducting; Gluck, especially his opera Orfeo. But, curiously, not Mozart, except for Don Giovanni, which was a fairly common view of Mozart in Wagner’s era, about half a century after Mozart’s death.
Most influential on Wagner were ancient authors, those of the great Teutonic epics in which he was deeply immersed, as well as his chief muse, the Ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, who was the composer’s artistic lodestar. What are the qualities of Aeschylus that made it into Wagner? Both wrote stark dramas that place characters in intense situations of moral ambiguity. And the famous role of the Greek chorus, those characters who interpreted the drama for the audience, was transferred into the orchestra by Wagner. Even if his works had an onstage chorus, he moved the actual dramatic role of the Greek chorus into the orchestra. This is but one of the reasons orchestras love Wagner so much: he places them at the center of the experience in a way most composers do not.
The second way to view Wagner is on the merits of his own works. Did they achieve his own goals for them? This is not just a question of do I like them?, which is private, and more a question of what did Wagner want to achieve?, and on this point Wagner is unassailable. Like it or not, very few composers achieved so close to what they set out to achieve. In the operas he completed—Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal, his life’s achievements—artists and audiences everywhere are still discovering things.
His youthful works, Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot, along with the operas he did not complete, are also a great part of his story. One must wonder what the world might have been like had his unfinished operas been brought to fruition: Friedrich I, Jesus of Nazareth (for which his abhorrently antisemitic prose scenario exists, so we can be thankful he didn’t finish this one), Achilles (Ancient Greece yet again), Wieland der Schmied, Die Sieger, and Eine Kapitulation (a nationalist farce about the Siege of Paris in 1870 by German forces).
And then there is the Wagner effect on what followed him. Here is where Wagner is almost incalculable, because every composer who followed him either imitated him or was forced to consciously try not to. It was an artistic reaction to Wagner that brought the Second Viennese School into existence, and Richard Strauss’s early operatic successes took the Wagnerian ethos to new levels. Many credible people thought Wagner stretched traditional harmony so far that he left no room for music to develop after him. Wagner himself said that “folk operas” were all opera’s future had room for after him, something one hears in different countries—in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, in Dvořák’s Rusalka, in Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, and even in the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, composed half a century after Wagner’s death. Today, from the distance of 2025, we are still, operatically, in a world Wagner created.
Missy Mazzoli, born in 1980 in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, has no ambitions to alter the thought processes of the world nor, thankfully, anything like the ego-driven self-importance of Wagner. She is shifting the trends of American opera, many of which have their origins in this company. One glaringly obvious aspect of operatic history, as with the history of so much, is the absence of women as creators. The list of female composers is disturbingly short, a reality that is rapidly changing, better late than never. This is not remotely the most fascinating thing about Missy or her art, but it is a part of operatic history in which she is also forever connected. Missy’s music is a response to the world, an artistic coping mechanism for the ambiguity of the world.
The Danish film director Lars von Trier, born in 1956, wrote the script for the 1996 film on which our opera is based, Breaking the Waves. In an interview that year, he offered an illuminating view of religion, in words one can almost hear Wagner uttering:
“As a child, you create all kinds of rituals to maintain control. I was very scared of the atom bomb, so every night when I went to bed I had to perform all these rituals to save the world. And from a psychological point of view, religion is a continuation of these childhood rituals, which are there to prevent everything from reverting back to chaos.”
Von Trier, like Wagner, is often described as arrogant and aloof, though it seems most of his behaviors are probably more a kind of self-protection. The extraordinary film Breaking the Waves, which was the breakout moment of the British actress Emily Watson, lingers long with anyone willing to take the journey, but not one thing about the film is easy, as it asks as much of an audience as does any opera. For von Trier, writing in the published screenplay of the film, Breaking the Waves is about “good,” or the concept of goodness, which seems immediately counterintuitive. But he explains:
“The character of Bess is ‘good’ in a spiritual sense. ... living mostly in the world of her imagination, never really accepting that things apart from ‘good’ might exist. ... Jan is ‘good’ in a much more difficult way, because he consciously aims to do ‘good’…by trying to save her, he loses her—by doing ‘good’! By trying to save him, by doing ‘good,’ the world that she loved turned against her.”
Beyond the searing subject of Breaking the Waves, one of the major effects of the film is visual: it was filmed largely with handheld cameras, then transferred to video, and then copied back onto film again, which gives the movie a grainy and hypnotic look. With Missy and Royce’s opera, where live visuals obviously have to be achieved solely with lighting and acting, the same hypnotic effect of the film is done through music. The score of Breaking the Waves is tonal and lyrical, disarmingly beautiful for the subject matter, and hallucinatory, the music of memory.
Von Trier’s prototype for Bess was the famous Justine as written by the Marquis de Sade, a character who is horribly exploited by men, only to thank God for having survived it all. The juxtaposition of sex and all of its distorting complications with religious faith is the ultimate subject of Breaking the Waves, both film and opera. As expected, the opera is a very different experience from the film, calling to mind the role of music in an opera as opposed to in a film. Music, as an abstract art, illuminates complex emotions, and the moment you name them they can lose their complexity, which is why the understanding of an opera, ultimately, lies fully in listening, not in reading or listening to anyone talk about it. Just as Bess sings in Royce Vavrek’s amazing libretto, she hears “strange beautiful music” when asked about Jan.
Missy Mazzoli’s musical palette, especially for someone still in their early forties, has emerged as something wholly new and personal, while retaining the influence of the band she founded, Victoire, which itself seems to absorb the influences of 400 years of musical history and fuse it into something relevant and vibrant. Though rooted in tonality, her music often feels haunted and ruminative. The first musical marking of Breaking the Waves is not Allegro or Andante or any other sort of standard musical marking. It is Brooding, a church service heard through a hurricane. Missy often distorts sonic expectations, beginning in traditional harmony and satelliting into other spaces.
The provocations of both Tannhäuser and Breaking the Waves move beyond the realms of opera, philosophy, and performance. They certainly delve into the worlds of religion, but no one will find religious conclusions confirmed or denied in either work. These operas ultimately land us in the netherworld of poets, the people who can distill the big questions into something digestible. Here is Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), who brings these worlds home:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers."
Wagner died on February 13, 1883, in Venice, and just a month later, another Victorian era provocateur shuffled off this mortal coil: Karl Marx passed in London. In that same momentous year, there occurred the loudest sound ever known on earth with the eruption of the island of Krakatoa near Java, an event that altered the world’s atmosphere for the years that followed. Not even the detonation of atomic bombs in the 20th century came close to the decibels that emerged from Krakatoa, which would be akin to a sound emanating from downtown Houston being heard in Machu Picchu. As the 1883 world bid a human farewell to Wagner and Marx, but not their controversial and consequential lives, the planet seemed to have a message for us as well. This sounds like the makings of a fine opera, with strange and beautiful music by Missy Mazzoli.