Decorated American composer Missy Mazzoli is one of the first two women to receive a commission from the Metropolitan Opera. Mazzoli spoke with Opera America Magazine from backstage at the Opéra Comique in Paris, just two weeks before the French premiere of her opera Breaking the Waves, originally a co-commission from Opera Philadelphia and Beth Morrison Projects. Her proj­ect with the Met, Lincoln in the Bardo, will open there in the fall of 2026.

I grew up in Lansdale, a suburb of Philadelphia, and I started on piano when I was about seven. I have a younger sister who also dabbled in piano and has an annoyingly better ear than I do, but she didn’t go into professional music.

I was pretty serious right away — I just loved the music. I said to my piano teacher, “Oh, what are these people called who make this music?’ And my teacher said, “These are composers.” And I said, “Well, then that’s what I’m gonna do.”

I remember my first opera vividly. I was 19 and going to school at Boston University. I heard that the Metropolitan Opera was performing Wozzeck, and even though I barely even knew anything about it, I took the bus down by myself and went to this opera. Wozzeck is a 90-minute opera by Berg. It’s about a disintegrat­ing relationship between this man, Wozzeck, and his wife, Marie. I remem­ber I sat in the last row at the Met, where you’re so high up in the family circle that you can prac­tically touch the ceiling. (I’m dreaming of having a scene in my Met pro­duction that just takes place at the top of the family circle for those people in the last rows.)

I was so far away that I don’t even remember that much about the produc­tion except looking down and seeing pools of blood everywhere. (I mean, it’s Wozzeck.) Still, I was so thrilled to be there. And eight years later, I started writing my first opera. That experience in 1999 started it all — see­ing Wozzeck was part of my decision to make my first opera a one-act piece. The first opera I composed was Song from the Uproar, which I wrote with the librettist Royce Vavrek, now my longtime collaborator, and it premiered in 2012.

Over the next few years, I realized that opera was what I’d been looking for: It’s an art form that tells stories and is relevant to what’s going on in the world today. When I saw Wozzeck, it seemed to me to be a window into the darkest parts of our souls. Since then, I’ve grown into an artist who’s always attracted to the darker side of things, and I’m interested in sto­ries that are a little bit controversial, a little bit dark. I think of opera as a sort of safe place to explore our darker impulses without having to act on them. We can get into ideas about betrayal, murder, and distrust and watch them play out on the stage so that they don’t have to play out in our lives.