FIVE THINGS WITH MISSY MAZZOLI

Missy Mazzoli had an ex who used to tell her she was a sex and death artist. “Unapologetically, I would say, yes, that’s true,” the Brooklyn-based, Grammy-nominated composer says. “I think that sex and death are the things that we are the least able to talk about in an intelligent and deep way. And they’re the most interesting things in the world.”

It’s the latter that grounds her fifth opera, Lincoln in the Bardo, a collaboration with librettist Royce Vavrek premiering at the Metropolitan Opera in 2026 and based on the George Saunders novel of the same name. The book tells the posthumous story of Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, who finds himself amongst a band of ghosts caught in a purgatory known as the bardo.

“Here’s this man who has to run an incredibly divided country during a war and is dealing with the loss of a child at the same time. And it’s also incredibly funny and surprising,” Missy says. The horror, the humor and the fact that the majority of the characters are dead makes the story well-suited for the surreal art form that is opera.

To Missy, the medium possesses an evocative power that mirrors life. “Music is mysterious enough that it can actually be a more accurate portrayal of how we experience the world, which is very mysterious and very confusing. I always say that I write music to explain the world to myself, and to connect with other people in that explanation.”

We were lucky enough to partner with BOMB Magazine to host Missy at Ace Hotel Brooklyn in April, where she premiered snippets of Lincoln. Afterwards, we caught up with her for our Five Things series, exploring unconventional inspiration points for her upcoming opera.

Cemeteries
This one might be a little obvious: walking through cemeteries. I was given a key to Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington D.C., where this opera takes place. I would go there all the time to visit Willie. And his crypt, which I really recommend to anyone, is absolutely beautiful and spooky. I’ve always loved walking around cemeteries and seeing how people memorialize their loved ones. This cemetery in particular is really beautiful and historic. And next to it, in the novel, there’s a place referred to as “the pit” on the other side of the fence where a lot of formerly enslaved people are buried. I believe this is a fictionalized nod to Mount Zion Cemetery, a cemetery nearby that is the resting place of mostly Black Washingtonians.

The key is something I’ll get to keep forever. If anyone wants to have a seance in Oak Hill Cemetery, let’s go.

Studying to Become a Death Doula
During the pandemic, I became really interested in possibly working as a hospice nurse — not as a new career, but in addition to. Then I quickly realized I had no medical training or time to study as a nurse, but that there was a way I could help people who are dying by becoming a death doula. A death doula is someone who supports the dying person and the family — spiritually, emotionally, physically, logistically. I studied with Alua Arthur, who runs a program called Going With Grace. It’s been a life-changing process for me, in terms of my understanding of grief and navigating healthcare systems in America in the midst of grief — which I think can often extend grief.

Being able to help people through that and allow people to grieve or process the fact that a loved one is very sick and dying has certainly impacted the writing of this piece where everyone is dead. It’s these ghosts in the bardo who refuse to admit that they’re dead for all different reasons. It gave me great insight into those characters, I’m getting into their psychological headspace and trying to understand why they refuse to admit that they’re dead. What is the resistance? This idea that the dead can be tormented by the living while the living are tormented by the dead was very interesting.

Volunteering at Rikers
This spring I did some volunteer work at Rikers, which is a notorious New York City jail. The first time I went, I was talking to people incarcerated there and I was like, what does this remind me of? Oh, this is the bardo. You have all these people waiting to be judged and in order to keep themselves alive, to keep themselves human, they tell their stories over and over and over again, which I totally understand. You are trying to remember who you are outside of this place. There are no clocks because you’re not supposed to have a sense of time. It’s a sort of psychological warfare, and it’s disorienting enough that you lose your bearings. All of these people in the book in the bardo are waiting in a sense to be judged, or they fear judgment. And so they’re procrastinating leaving because they know they’re going to be judged, especially the reverend who knows that he’s dead and has had this vision into this horrific afterlife. Working in jails gave me this really distinct feeling of this in-between place of great stress and judgment where stories become the most important thing.

David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion
This choral work is based on the 1845 Hans Christian Anderson story “The Little Match Girl,” and is one of my favorite pieces of music of the last twenty years. In his program note Lang writes, “What drew me to ‘The Little Match Girl’ is that the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts — the horror and the beauty — are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl’s bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness. There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope.” This combination of opposites, or the embodying of opposites within a single melody, note or chord, closely mirrors how we think and feel — emotions are rarely tidy, experience is rarely wholly good or bad. I feel compelled to express myself through music because of this tantalizing possibility; in each moment, in each chord, we can communicate something mysterious and true about the complex human experience.

“Lincoln on the Verge” by Ted Widner
I read a lot of books on Lincoln when writing this opera; one passage in Widner’s book, which follows Lincoln between his election and inauguration, describes the president’s fascination with the space between life and death:

“The nearness of death was a fact of life on the frontier, but Lincoln retained his fatalism to an unusual degree for a working politician. He wrote old poems about trees that were shedding dewdrop tears, and described the sound of a funeral dirge that followed him, which only he could hear, ‘as if I dreamed.’ In fact, Lincoln did dream, intensely, and his verses also spoke of a ‘midway world’ that he liked to visit, where he could be a ‘companion of the dead.’ It was a well-known political trick to register the names of deceased voters; but Lincoln seemed to be actually conversing with them. In his poems, he was ‘living in the tombs.'”

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