Born on October 27, 1980, in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and resides in Brooklyn New York
Orpheus Undone
Part 1: Behold the Machine (O Death)
Part 2: We of Violence, We Endure
Composed: 2019
Estimated length: 16 minutes
First performance: March 31, 2022, with Riccardo Muti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the Nashville Symphony's first performances of this work.
Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 2022, Missy Mazzoli burst on the scene a dozen or so years ago with music that demonstrated a riveting theatrical imagination. She has become especially sought after as an opera composer through such remarkable stage works as Breaking the Waves (2016), Proving Up (2018), and The Listeners (2021) and is one of the first two women (together with Jeanine Tesori) to have received a commission from the Metropolitan Opera. The last-named work-in-progress is based on George Saunders’s 2017 experimental novel Lincoln in the Bardo that is slated to be premiered in 2026.
Mazzoli has also found success with her chamber and orchestral music. As with numerous fellow composers of her generation, she draws inspiration from across the available spectrum of genres and styles—from early music to punk and indie rock. Yet she has amalgamated these into a unique and deeply involving voice of her own. Mazzoli’s music moreover reflects her omnivorous interests in other disciplines, particularly theater, literature, the visual arts, and film.
In 2019, Mazzoli wrote the ballet Orpheus Alive in collaboration with the choreographer Robert Binet and the playwright Rosamund Small for the National Ballet of Canada. Its underlying concept, according to the composer, “turns the traditional Orpheus myth on its head” by representing Orpheus as “a woman who creates the ballet as it unfolds around her. She creates a stunning offering to the audience, who have been cast as the gods of the underworld, ready to decide her fate.”
Mazzoli continued to reimagine the Orpheus myth in Orpheus Undone, which she wrote on a commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra during her tenure as Mead Composer-in-Residence. It is “the longest and largest work that I have created outside of opera,” says Mazzoli, and is comprised of two movements that are linked without pause: Behold the Machine (O Death) and We of Violence, We Endure. These titles are derived from the 1922 cycle Sonnets to Orpheus by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
Mazzoli took small fragments from her Orpheus Alive ballet score as source material for Orpheus Undone, which depicts “two brief moments in the Orpheus myth.” The first movement turns to the moment of Eurydice’s death, suggesting the inexorable measuring of time evoked by “clock-like, snappy” tappings on the wood block. Its mechanical determinism contrasts with stirring melodic ideas, swirling textures and troubled harmonies conveying the intensity of human emotion and memory.
Mazzoli explores the sense of disorientation triggered by tragedy through the use of multiple tempi that unfold simultaneously, as well as strikingly new sonic mixtures. The second movement, about half the length of the first, focuses on the moment in which Orpheus resolves to seek out his beloved by following her into the Underworld. Overall, the piece reflects what she describes as “the baffling and surreal stretching of time in moments of trauma or agony.”
Scored for 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons (2nd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, 2 percussionists, harp, piano, and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
Featured on Wagner & Dvořák — September 28 & 29, 2024
Nashville Symphony
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor
Simone Porter, violin
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