A Mesmerizing New Opera About a Sonic Cult

Claire Devon, the protagonist of Missy Mazzoli's seductively nightmarish opera "The Listeners," is living contentedly as a suburban schoolteacher somewhere in the Southwest when she is beset by an inexplicable, inescapable sound. It is described as a "dull hum," an "aggressive drone," which renders daily existence intolerable. As she searches for the source of the noise, her life unravels by degrees. She develops an ill-defined, ill-fated attachment to one of her students, who also hears the hum. Her husband and her daughter move out; the school fires her. She falls in with a psychiatrist, Howard Bard, who presides over a cultish association of Listeners—people attuned to the hum. When one of them, a conspiracy theorist, fires a gun at a cell tower, the police spring into action and violence ensues. The ending is as unexpected as it is unsettling. Instead of fleeing the cult, Claire takes control of it, the hum having awakened charismatic powers within her. "We all need a family that understands us," she intones, as Listeners crowd around her.

"The Listeners," which had its première at the Norwegian National Opera, in 2022, and travelled to Opera Philadelphia last month, tells a familiar story of virulent environmental anxiety, in the vein of Todd Haynes's 1995 film, "Safe." What gives the opera peculiar potency is the way Mazzoli embeds the hum in her score, letting it represent something bigger and more pervasive than a chat-room delusion. At first, we hear a series of high-pitched, metallically ringing chords, not entirely unpleasant in character. Then, as Claire looks into the eyes of a coyote and senses chaotic energies rising within her, the hum gravitates downward, with double-basses and piano slithering across the classically diabolical interval of the tritone. Mazzoli piles unstable harmonies on top of that fractured foundation; trombone glissandos add a demonic sneer. This mesmerizing sonic shadow suggests the way sounds can alter our being and bind us into groups, for good or for ill.

In the past decade, Mazzoli, a forty-three-year-old native of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, has moved to the forefront of American opera composers. Her first effort, "Song from the Uproar" (2012), is a dreamlike portrait of the Swiss adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt. There followed "Breaking the Waves" (2016), a reshaping of the film by Lars von Trier, and "Proving Up" (2018), a harrowing tale of Nebraska homesteaders. Mazzoli has also adapted George Saunders's novel "Lincoln in the Bardo," which the Metropolitan Opera plans to stage in 2026. She is now composing "The Galloping Cure," an update of Kafka's "Country Doctor" for the opioid-epidemic era. Her librettist for all these projects has been the Canadian-born writer Royce Vavrek, who fuses gritty realism with apocalyptic fantasy.

"The Listeners" is based on an original story by Vavrek's fellow-Canadian Jordan Tannahill, who subsequently developed the material into a novel, also called "The Listeners," published in 2021. News reports of people hearing a low hum—in Taos, New Mexico, among other places—inspired Tannahill to create a deft sendup of digital-age paranoia and perennial mystical longings. Vavrek's libretto, likewise, has satirical touches: there are references to Facebook Live, the dark Web, dick pics, herbal tea. But the artifice of operatic singing prospers on more elemental, mythic terrain, which Vavrek artfully supplies. "I like the wild in you, / Brings out the wild in me," Claire sings to the coyote. "We're not so different." Tannahill's novel ends with the protagonist more or less restored to normalcy. Opera, naturally, wants it darker.

Mazzoli's score is perhaps her most original work to date. While her previous operas contain periodic reminiscences of composers from Britten to John Adams, "The Listeners" is pretty much all Mazzoli: sinuously songful vocal lines; furtively expressive instrumental solos, especially for the woodwinds; a harmonic language that finds newness and strangeness in the interstices of traditional tonality; unerring narrative pacing. Above all, Mazzoli is a once-in-a-generation magician of the orchestra. Wagner commented that in opera the orchestra should act as a medium of premonition, indicating what is foreordained but not yet foreseen. Mazzoli does this instinctively, making our hackles rise.

The Opera Philadelphia Orchestra, under the baton of Corrado Rovaris, revelled in Mazzoli's billowing sonorities. Lileana Blain-Cruz, who directed the show, and Adam Rigg, who designed the sets, expertly summoned the opera's modern-day settings, from Claire's drab suburban house to the sleek desert villa where Bard preaches to his flock. At times, I wanted an edgier, spookier take on the story; the scene featuring Bard's Facebook Live broadcast, with crass comments projected on a screen, was played too much for giggles. Kevin Burdette, who played Bard, is a brilliant comedic singer, but he could have conveyed more of the character's pompous menace. Nicole Heaston, as Claire, delivered a vocally pristine, emotionally scouring portrayal, showing how pain and loss can evolve into cold rage.

Future productions of "The Listeners" should reveal deeper layers. In many ways, it's an opera about music itself: Bard, molding an ensemble of hummers, resembles an imperious maestro. As the chorus takes refuge in syrupy concords, I suspected Mazzoli of satirizing contemporary choral music of the blissed-out, post-Arvo Pärt variety. She herself generates gorgeous textures, yet she does so in the knowledge that no sounds are innocent—that music can be as lethal a weapon as any in the human arsenal. "The hum is cruel but kind," Claire sings. "We are just notes in the bigger chord." The last thing we hear is a towering dissonance, bordering on noise.

Jeanine Tesori's "Grounded," which had its première at Washington National Opera last year and is now playing at the Met, aspires to the same sort of cultural currency that Mazzoli and Vavrek attain with ease. The libretto, which George Brant adapted from his play of the same name, tells of Jess, an ace F-16 pilot who is reassigned to ground duty guiding a Reaper drone. She suffers a breakdown, haunted by aerial footage of people being blown to bits. Her flannel-wearing rancher husband, Eric, consoles her with homespun wisdom. The production, by Michael Mayer, reaches for tableaux of all-American realness: a Wyoming bar with a Coors sign, a Las Vegas mall with a Cinnabon. People say "fuck" a lot.

But it all rings false. The opening scenes resemble a misbegotten "Top Gun" musical, with choristers in fighter-pilot suits swaying from side to side and holding their arms in wing formation. "You'll never have a sweeter ride / Forever wear that suit with pride," they sing. Jess is saddled with lines such as "My mind should be on Mosul / Not Eric" and "I've never been good at goodbyes." The pacing is fitful: only toward the end of the first act does the central conflict emerge. Above all, Tesori's facelessly eclectic approach is inadequate to the subject. In 2012, the Belgian composer Stefan Prins wrote a piece titled "Generation Kill," which used video-game technology to dramatize the harnessing of high-tech pop culture to military brutality. No such resourcefulness is evident in Tesori's score, which wavers between mid-century film-music heroics and sentimental lamentations, with tame avant-garde gestures popping up here and there. The mezzo-soprano Emily D'Angelo was tremendous in the lead role, yet the notes evaporated from the mind as soon as she sang them.

New opera is generally thriving. On the East Coast, the last week of September brought not only "Grounded" and "The Listeners" but also Meredith Monk's "Indra's Net," at the Armory; Paola Prestini's "Silent Light," at National Sawdust; Michael Hersch's "and we, each," at Baltimore Theatre Project; and David T. Little's "What Belongs to You," at the University of Richmond. Amid the surfeit, duds are inevitable. The sad thing was to see the nation's biggest company lagging so far in the rear. Not for the first time, the Met was outclassed by Opera Philadelphia, which operates on about one-thirtieth the budget. The hum is cruel but kind.