PHILADELPHIA — Missy Mazzoli received an Opera Philadelphia composing commission around the time Donald Trump first was running for president, inspiring her to settle on a sect with faithful followers as a starting point with her librettist, Royce Vavrek.
“The role of a charismatic leader in our society, the need to feel like you’re part of a tribe, part of community,” she said. “And just the idea of turning an opera chorus into a cult seemed really juicy.”
Mazzoli and Vavrek created “The Listeners,” a two-hour expose of psychological manipulation given its U.S. premiere on Wednesday night at the Academy of Music, two years after its first performances at the Norwegian National Opera. Their work portrays a school teacher who hears an unknown low-pitched hum, is alienated from her husband and daughter and finds a group of similar people that become enthralled with a leader named Paul Devon (baritone Paul Cook).
“It just opened my eyes to how people are so interested in joining cults and feeling that sense of relationship with other people and connection and how sad, how lonely people are out there,” said soprano Nicole Heaston, who sings the starring role of Claire Devon. “They need that one person to say, 'I’m going to make this OK for you.‘”
Bringing in new opera audiences
In the opening of general director Anthony Roth Costanzo’s first season as Opera Philadelphia’s “pick your price” initiative that lowered tickets to $11, the company said the crowd of 1,862 included 58% new attendees.
A production filled with profane language and sexual situations sparked noticeable audience engagement that included laughter, guffaws for projected online commentary and applause for arias and duets. The reaction in Norway was more subdued.
“In Oslo it was this really kind of fascinating anthropological visit of America,” director Lileana Blain-Cruz said. “We were working with a lot of Norwegians. It was: What is America? What is Americana? What is the Southwest to people who’ve never been there, who’ve only kind of experienced America for television? How do you display the kind of angst and loneliness that is particularly American? And it’s funny that being in Philadelphia, there’s an immediate recognition that was like: All right. We get this. This is us.”
How ‘The Listeners’ was created
Mazzoli, who turns 44 next month, was born in the Philadelphia suburb of Lansdale, received degrees from Boston University’s College of Fine Arts and the Yale School of Music, and was Opera Philadelphia's composer in residence from 2012-15.
She met Vavrek at Carnegie Hall in 2009 when they were at a workshop of David T. Little’s “Dog Days,” for which Vavrek wrote the libretto. Mazzoli gave him a flier for a workshop of her “Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt” He wound up collaborating on the 2012 work they also teamed on “Breaking the Waves” (2016) and “Proving Up” (2018).
Vavrek, a 41-year-old from Alberta who like Mazzoli lives in Brooklyn, invited Canadian author Jordan Tannahill to watch the 2015 Oscars at his apartment and later asked Tannahill to sketch out some ideas for a cult opera. Vavrek and Mazzoli picked two of the five, and Tannahill followed up with a four-to-seven-page treatment that led to Vavrek’s libretto. Tannahill also wrote a novel version of “The Listeners” that was published in 2021 and is the basis for a BBC television series to be televised this fall, starring Rebecca Hall.
Mazzoli was inspired for a character based on Ma Anand Sheela, an assistant to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh featured in the Netflix 2018 documentary “Wild Wild Country.” She also watched “Holy Hell” about the Buddhafield cult, “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief” and “Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult.”
There are surround speakers to create the hum and a large cast of 22 singers plus the chorus. During rehearsals in Oslo two years ago, Mazzoli and Vavrek added two video confessional moments for Claire and Angela Devon, scenes given a larger-than-life impact by projections.
“Through the research, I myself became more much more sympathetic to people who were just looking for a community,” Mazzoli said. “Cults are made up of people whose parents kicked them out because they’re gay or who are super shy and never found a community of people, friends in college. It could be anything — or who feel trapped in a marriage or feel trapped in a dead-end job.”
“What was striking was that all of these cults followed the same pattern,” she added. “There’s a sort of predictable series of events involving manipulation, lying and then someone sort of taking up the card from the bottom of the house of cards and the whole thing falls very quickly.”
Next steps for ‘The Listeners’
“The Listeners” also will be repeated in Philadelphia on Friday and Sunday, and there will be additional performances at the Aalto Music Theatre in Essen, Germany (Jan. 25 to March 22) and the Lyric Opera of Chicago (March 30 to April 11).
Mazzoli and Vavrek also are working on “Lincoln in the Bardo,” based on George Saunders’ novel, which premieres at the Los Angeles Opera in February 2026 and goes to New York’s Metropolitan Opera that October. “The Galloping Cure,” about the opioid crisis, debuts in Scotland in August 2026.
“It’s a very internalized space when you’re being creative,” Vavrek said. “There’s something really beautiful about the actual sharing of something that you’ve been imagining for so long.”
