After the Premiere: Do You Hear It? Belief and Authority in Missy Mazzoli’s and Royce Vavrek’s “The Listeners”

Listening as Power. A two-part After the Premiere essay on belief, authority, and the ethics of hearing in contemporary opera. (Part 1 of 2)

In my previous After the Premiere essay, written in response to André de Ridder’s return to English National Opera with Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Mahagonny, I considered how opera confronts moments of social rupture — how it exposes the moral instability of societies built on illusion, appetite, and the fragile fictions we agree to share. The Listeners, by Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek, approaches a similar terrain from a very different angle. Where Mahagonny stages collapse through excess and spectacle, The Listeners locates fracture in intimacy: in listening, in belief, and in the human need to be heard. Both operas ask what happens when meaning breaks down, when authority fills the vacuum left by uncertainty, and when communities form not around truth, but around the promise of recognition.

By Justin Vickers

Missy Mazzoli’s and Royce Vavrek’s opera The Listeners begins with a question that is at once intimate yet destabilizing: Do you hear it? 

Not what do you hear, or why, but simply whether you hear anything at all. From that question unfolds an opera that is less about sound itself than about what happens to people when sound becomes the axis around which identity, community, and authority begin to turn. Indeed, around which it spins out of control.

The “Global Hum” and the Politics of Listening

The Listeners occupies a liminal space in America in the twenty-first century. It begs a question of modern society: If someone listened to you—when no one else would—could you stomach the loss of your spouse? Your child? Your job?

The Listeners is an operatic vision centered on the inexplicable: the eerie enigma of the “global hum.” That hum is described as a ceaseless, low-frequency vibration—or high-frequency environmental noise—which torments between 2% and 4% of humanity. A Google search of “global hum” will generate a litany of disquieting results. The hum is an auditory specter that is both alienating and inescapable.

In its reckoning with an invisible sound, Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s opera The Listeners delivers a haunting meditation on perception, power, and collective delusion. Through an intricate sonic landscape that blurs the line between external reality and crippling inner obsession, the opera explores how disorientation can foster belief, how sound may become a tool of both revelation and control, and how the search for meaning can spiral into hysteria. In the opera, a cult-like leader has emerged, intent on deceiving a group of suffering yet acquiescent followers. The Listeners is as much an auditory labyrinth as it is a psychological one, amplifying modern anxieties over technology, while immersing its audience in the unsettling politics of listening.

When I wrote this passage for Lyric Opera of Chicago’s spring 2025 production in a piece called “Longing to Belong,” I was concerned above all with resisting explanation. The temptation, with a phenomenon like the “global hum,” is to chase causality: the medical, the technological, or the conspiratorial. What has stayed with me since is that The Listeners is far less interested in why the hum exists than in what it does: how it reorganizes perception, how it produces community, and how quickly that community becomes susceptible to authority.

Listening again, with some distance from the premiere, I still hear this opening claim less as description than as warning. Disorientation does not merely precede belief; it actively produces it. When the world becomes unintelligible, interpretation itself becomes a form of power.

Sound, Disorientation, and the Formation of Belief

Asked about the hum, Mazzoli speaks of its inherent invitation: “This idea lends itself perfectly to opera: it’s about sound and the soundscape that shapes our lives for better or for worse. And that is what opera is all about!”

The opera’s premise is deceptively simple: a small group of people hear something most do not. That asymmetry is enough to generate isolation, then curiosity, then collective explanation. The Listeners understands that belief rarely begins as ideology. It begins as relief — relief at not being alone.

The opening chorus in the Prologue — as a sort of answer to the painful struggle we’ve learned is tormenting Thom, Danica, and Dillon, part of the group of “Listeners” — asks: “Do you hear it? Do you always hear it?” The sustained urgency, voice grinding against voice, builds to a unison second statement of “hear it.” The group continues: “A dull hum. An aggressive drone. The disruptor of our lives.” The men’s voices close the word “hum” to a sustained hmmm… vibrating beneath the women’s voices. Half-step clashing between the voices creates a jarring, beautiful effect. We see their faces in home video footage. Theories are espoused for the cacophonous presence of the hum: Ghost radio frequencies. The foundation rumbling. Governmental mind control. Radiation leaked from cell phone towers. Mazzoli generates a soundworld to maximum consequence as the opera unfolds.

But it is the central character Claire who ushers us into this humming world. Solitary. In the moonlight. In her backyard. She is a woman on the edge. And on that precipice, she is joined by a coyote with whom she communicates, who just may be talking with her. She sees that they’re not so very different, she and the coyote. The coyote may be an embodiment of her subconscious, capable of illuminating truth, or perhaps representative of latent desire. She cries out: “Howling. Owwoo! Owwoo!” The coyote joins her, baying. Her husband Paul interrupts her, begging her to come inside. The coyote offers a sort of ritual dance, a dance that Claire will repeat at the opera’s dénouement. Tethered to Claire, the coyote just as likely represents chaos being introduced into Claire’s existence.

At the school where she teaches, Claire finds an unexpected connection with her student Kyle, who describes the “hard buzz” he has been hearing. In a heartbreaking moment of vulnerability, Kyle asks: “How do you murder a sound that no one else hears?”

Shocked, Claire—who thought she was entirely alone—finds connection. This triggers a cascade of events.

Claire and Kyle find understanding and solace through a group led by Howard Bard. Kyle found out about the group in an online video. Angela Rose—“Howard’s number two”— initially welcomes them to the home filled with his followers. Those who hear the hum are “concerned citizens” with especially “sensitive ears,” Howard assures them. The Prologue’s Thom, Danica, and Dillon are there. Howard’s Listeners possess the ability “to understand this plague of sound.” Kyle is subsumed into the chorus, a follower.

But Claire repeats her opening phrases with the coyote. And she so easily steps into the world of Howard and Angela, literally falling into the rhythm and cadence of their well-practiced speeches. “I see you Claire,” Howard says. “There’s a leader sleeping inside you.”

Soprano and Chicago-native Nicole Heaston, center, sings the role of Claire in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s spring 2025 production of Missy Mazzoli’s and Royce Vavrek’s opera The Listeners. Claire stands beside the coyote, during the opera’s final scene. Photo © Cory Weaver.

Leaders have a vision. The way they express that vision gains adherents. It can be used for great good, but it can also have a darker purpose. Charismatic leaders can woo followers without limit. They can manipulate an individual’s complex psyche, they can pry apart—or insert themselves into—interpersonal relationships, they can create a paradigm in which their followers feel lost in their absence. The title of a “cult leader”—and the idea of a “cult following”—is part of our vernacular. We have seen this in American society before, and indeed, in societies around the world.

Ironically, the term cult can come to represent the discrete views of both a listener and a speaker, both of whom may assign entirely different significance to the term. Social anthropologist Susannah Crockford asserts: “The word ‘cult’ is a shapeshifter, semantically morphing with the intentions of whoever uses it. As an analytical term, it resists rigorous definition.” It is itself a signifier both of its user and of its subject’s followers.

What the opera stages with unusual acuity is the incremental nature of the process of its characters’ gradual dis-integration. No single revelation converts its characters. Rather, belief accretes slowly, stabilized by repetition, reinforced by communal language, and protected by a shared sense of grievance.

Sound becomes the medium through which this fragile epistemology takes shape.

The Listeners. Photo © Cory Weaver.

Cult, Confession, and the Asymmetry of Being Heard

The “global hum” serves as a metaphor for the way isolation and uncertainty drive individuals toward collective belief systems, conspiracy theories, and cult-like devotion. Video confessionals — a central visual presence in The Listeners — are weaponized as a tool of control and a means of psychological manipulation, exploiting the recordings to deepen devotion while eroding individual autonomy.

This passage now strikes me as the ethical center of the opera. The Listeners understands with uncomfortable clarity that listening is never neutral. To invite someone to speak is also to shape the conditions under which that speech acquires meaning.

The opera’s use of video confessionals serves to isolate individuals in direct address to the camera, somewhere between private introspection and public declaration. By framing these recorded testimonies as acts of personal revelation, the psychiatrist Howard Bard encourages members to articulate their doubts, fears, and spiritual breakthroughs, turning private thoughts into the performative. As both a narrative device and a psychological lens, the camera—far from passive—becomes an instrument of coercion, deepening both paranoia and submission.

The confessionals do not merely document belief; they manufacture it. They isolate individuals while persuading them they are being seen.

Authority here is exercised not through enforced silence, but through attentiveness — or, more precisely, through the performance of attentiveness. What the opera exposes is how easily care slides into control when listening becomes asymmetric.

How Sound Shapes Authority in Contemporary Opera

Because so much of the opera exists in the interiority of the human psyche — in which the audience genuinely has no idea what the Listeners may or may not be hearing — it was vital that Mazzoli have a clear sense of how to portray the hum. She specifies: “I wanted the audience to know, as soon as the electronics entered, that they were hearing the hum. It has to be something different from any other sound coming out of the orchestra.” Therefore, Mazzoli recounts: “The hum is always depicted through electronics.” At three distinct moments in the opera, we hear electronic cues, and a soundmass that leaves nothing to the imagination.

What I hear more acutely now is how carefully the score calibrates our listening. The hum itself is unmistakable when it appears — alien, intrusive, impossible to confuse with the orchestra — yet it is also strikingly restrained. Much of the opera unfolds not in the hum’s presence, but in its echo: the anticipation of its eventual return, the acoustic residue it leaves behind.

In my piece for the Lyric, I wrote that it is “in this curious not-quite-frightening waiting, our anticipation building, Mazzoli has us in her grip.” Quite.

The audience is never allowed the comfort of full identification with the Listeners, nor the safety of total distance. We begin to listen for the hum, to wonder whether we have missed it, to question our own perception. In that sense, the opera quietly recruits us into its experiment.

We, too, become listeners — alert, uncertain, and susceptible.

Leadership Without Resolution: Power After the Curtain Falls

The opera’s conclusion offers no concrete answers. There is only a new leader. And this one — Claire — is actually listening. She can hear. The coyote sits by Claire’s side as the new leader of the Listeners howls yet again.

I am more convinced than ever that this refusal of closure is one of the opera’s most bracing decisions. The Listeners does not dismantle the structure that produced its crisis. It simply replaces one figure of authority with another.

Claire’s ascension is not framed as redemption. It is framed as inheritance. She hears the hum where Howard did not, but the opera never promises that listening alone is sufficient protection against repetition. If anything, it suggests that the desire to be heard — and to hear — is precisely what keeps such structures alive.

Why Listening Becomes Dangerous in The Listeners

What I could not yet articulate, when I first wrote about The Listeners, was how deliberately Mazzoli herself understands listening as an ethical and not merely sonic act. That insight emerged most clearly not from the score alone, but through conversation: in the way she spoke about restraint, about electronics, and about the point at which sound ceases to invite empathy and begins to erode it.

At that juncture, analysis reaches its limit. To go further requires listening differently — not just to the opera, but to the composer thinking aloud about its risks, its responsibilities, and its afterlife.

© Justin Vickers, 2026

Next week, in Part 2, I turn from listening to the opera to listening to the composer herself.

During March and April 2025, I had the distinct privilege of giving the pre-performance lectures for The Listeners at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and engaging in a pair of marvelous discussions with the creatives and cast, and separately with the composer herself. And critically, I found myself cast in the role of a listener whose understanding was also shaped through conversation with these deeply generous artists. And so, After the Premiere continues to be a space where I listen to operas, and to the people who make them, in order to understand how meaning circulates after the curtain falls.

My conversations with Mazzoli make clear that listening, in this opera — and more broadly — is never passive. It is active. It is urgent. And therefore to listen and to be in dialogue feels, somehow, especially resonant in relation to The Listeners, where the ethics of listening are the opera’s very subject. And my hope is that the blog will thus perform what it analyzes.

Until next week. —JMV