When Missy Mazzoli’s best friend and collaborator, the librettist Royce Vavrek, first suggested turning Danish director Lars von Trier’s 1996 film Breaking the Waves into an opera, she was wary. “It’s a great film – I didn’t want to create something that was less than that,” the American composer says. “I really had to get to the point where I realised … that I had the power, just by virtue of the difference in genre, to create a very different experience.”
That initial hesitation is understandable: von Trier is one of arthouse cinema’s most divisive directors, and Breaking the Waves is a violent, harrowing film.
Emily Watson as Bess in a scene from Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves.
It follows Bess, a young woman in a small Calvinist community in 1970s Scotland, who goes to increasingly brutal lengths to please her husband, Jan. Depending on who you ask, it’s brilliant, subversive cinema highlighting the oppressive nature of patriarchy and religion, or misogynistic, misanthropic perversion.
Mazzoli and Vavrek’s version has taken on a life of its own. Since premiering in 2016, Breaking the Waves has become one of contemporary opera’s most talked-about productions. Mazzoli herself is a trailblazer in opera and modern classical music – dubbed the “post-millennial Mozart” by Time Out New York, she was one of the first women to be commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera House.
One of the most essential changes is the use of music – other than rock numbers in the title cards, the film has no music at all.
“I really felt that I had free rein to invent a musical language for these characters,” Mazzoli says. “With the film, there’s a rawness that is very uncomfortable. There is no emotional cushion there ... the opera is also very intense, and I didn’t set out to soften the experience, but I think inevitably, music has that effect.”
Missy Mazzoli was once dubbed the “post-millennial Mozart”.Credit: Marylene Mey
In the research phase, Mazzoli and Vavrek travelled to Scotland, where the composer found herself influenced by nature. “Scotland has this landscape of extremes – you have rock cliffs, and then a rolling, soft meadow full of baby sheep,” she says. “It’s a violent landscape, but also a soft, welcoming landscape too.” These opposites find their way into the music, both jagged and lush.
The opera has played in Australia only once before, in Adelaide in March 2020. It makes its Melbourne premiere at Hamer Hall, starring Jennifer Black as Bess and Duncan Rock as Jan, and directed by Melbourne Theatre Company artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks, who is working in opera for the first time.
“I’ve spent all of my career in the theatre choosing work that puts women at the centre and tackles big, complex themes,” Sarks says. “This felt like a really natural fit.”
Alongside set designer Marg Horwell and lighting designer Paul Jackson, Opera Australia’s semi-staged production of Breaking the Waves takes a minimalist approach.
Rehearsals for Opera Australia’s semi-staged production of Breaking the Waves in Melbourne. Credit: Wayne Taylor
“The three of us made a decision together to create a really simple, gestural world for this story to sit in,” Sarks explains. “Marg is bringing these incredible six-metre string curtains … sometimes they’ll feel like water, or even like rain falling from the sky. It’s this sense of the epic, and we’ve created imagery inside and around those curtains.”
The curtains isolate and spotlight Bess, giving her agency and a vivid emotional life. “The opportunity to lift her out, separate her and foreground her feels really right for this story, to make sure that the audience feels really connected to her,” Sarks says. “We’re investing as much as we can in this woman and her search for what it means to be good.”
The opera doesn’t shy away from the extreme content of the film, but it aims not to be gratuitous.
“I will stop writing pieces about violence against women when there is no more violence against women in the world … I don’t think that illuminating it is condoning it,” Mazzoli says. “I’m telling the whole thing from [Bess’s] perspective… to portray the plight that many women, myself included, have found ourselves in.”
Anne-Louise Sarks is directing opera for the first time. Credit: Wayne Taylor
This version being primarily written and directed by women also shifts the perspective. “It’s so important to me to be able to bring the female lens to these stories,” says Sarks. “It influences every choice, particularly around the portrayal of violence on stage.”
These nuances make Breaking the Waves more than just an adaptation. Neither Mazzoli nor Sarks has rewatched the film for years, and other than signing off on the rights, von Trier has not been involved.
“I would love at some point to have a dialogue with him, but I also recognise that my view of the story is very different from his, and I think we’re both totally OK with that,” Mazzoli says.
For Sarks, Mazzoli’s music turns darkness into light. “By adding this rich, stunning score … [Mazzoli] somehow manages to create these moments of pure beauty or uplift – so what could be dark and distressing becomes almost heavenly,” she says.
“The emotional, psychological storytelling is there in the music. That felt really liberating as a director … that we could do less at times, because there are these other extraordinary elements telling the story.”
Breaking the Waves will be performed at Hamer Hall on July 26.
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