The Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA) has announced the winner of their inaugural MCANA Opera Award, for which Musical Toronto’s Arthur Kaptainis was a jury member.
According to its guidelines, the award honours “musical and theatrical excellence by the composer and librettist of an opera that received its world premiere in North America during the preceding calendar year.” This year’s inaugural award was discerned to Breaking the Waves (composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek), premiered by Opera Philadelphia on September 22, 2016.
The opera is based on the 1996 Cannes Grand Prix-winning film of the same name by Lars von Trier. Both film and opera revolve around the same female lead who fulfills sexual favours, but the latter shines a contemporary light on women’s role in society: in the original film, a naïve woman operates under decisions made by the males in her life and by God, while Mazzoli and Vavrek have cast a more empowered female in the opera. This dictates an entirely different tone for an otherwise unchanged story.
“[Vavrek and Mazzoli] completely turned it on its head, and made it into a story of a woman who makes a choice, and pursues it to the death,” summarized jury member Heidi Waleson (opera critic, The Wall Street Journal). “I was really fascinated by the uplifting and spiritual quality that was completely the opposite of what I felt about the movie.”
The MCANA joins a growing number of classical music organizations that are embracing classical music in modernized presentations.
“I think that there is a real explosion in interest in contemporary work, and it has spread beyond the couple of opera companies that we’re always devoted to,” Waleson further commented.
Fellow jury member Alex Ross (music critic, The New Yorker) reflected on contemporary art as an indicator of society today: “We’re finally seeing better representation of women as composers, and especially as composers of opera. This is exciting to see the roster of composers creating music looking more like the real world we live in… [Breaking the Waves] is the [nomination] that stuck with me the longest, and I just kept thinking back to it and sorting through my impressions of it. That’s the sign of a work that should have some staying power.”
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