After the Premiere: Listening with the Composer. Ethics, Authority, and the Afterlife of Missy Mazzoli’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 2 of 2)

By Justin Vickers

I came to understand The Listeners more fully not by hearing it again, but by listening differently. This time, to my great delight, in conversation with the composer herself.

(As a Benjamin Britten scholar, I cannot underscore how frequently I wish I could sit and have a conversation with the composer. To ask a question. To listen where the answer may lead.)

What follows is not an attempt to ventriloquize the composer, nor to retreat into quotation as a substitute for thought. These conversations were dialogic by nature: shaped by questions, interruptions, clarifications, and shared assumptions. Listening here is not passive reception, but an ethical practice of attention under conditions of exchange. What emerges is not Missy Mazzoli’s voice alone, but a way of thinking about sound, restraint, and authority that took shape between us. 

Rather than treat these conversations as a source of authoritative “answers,” I want to stay close to what Mazzoli actually did in speaking about The Listeners: she clarified compositional problems, named psychological mechanisms, and insisted on moral complexity. The three remarks below, presented as discrete excerpts, mark the coordinates of that thinking.

First, the hum is not a metaphor the orchestra gradually implies. It is a sonic object the audience must recognize at once, and it must remain categorically distinct.

“How do we represent that sonically? … How will the audience know that, ‘Oh, that sound — that’s the hum they’ve been talking about?’ … You will hear it three times in the opera. That is the hum.”

Second, she describes recognition not as comfort, but as a kind of intoxication: the hinge that turns private suffering into communal belief.

“When you feel like you’re the only person suffering from something, and then someone’s like, ‘Oh no — I suffer from that too … I understand’ … it’s completely intoxicating.”

Finally, she resists the moral shorthand that would convert the opera into a fable about villains and victims. The ethical charge lies precisely in the unstable mixture of care and coercion.

“I’m never really interested … in creating, like, good guys/bad guys. … I write music … to create a language for the things for which we have no words.”

Taken together, these remarks illuminate why listening in The Listeners cannot be treated as sensory experience alone: it is the medium through which belief is organized, power is routed, and ethical risk is distributed. 

On the opera’s origins, Mazzoli commented: “We were commissioned by Opera Philadelphia to do a grand opera; the biggest work we had ever done. And we really wanted to do an original story.” The Listeners is an original story that was created specifically for the opera house. Vavrek crafted the libretto built off fellow-Canadian author and playwright Jordan Tannahill’s idea. Mazzoli notes: “So much of opera is adaptation, but we were really interested in flipping it around. What story would you tell if you knew it had to live on a stage like this first?”

A composer who begins by insisting on opera’s conditions — voice, stage, collective attention — is already thinking about listening as structure.

In two extended conversations surrounding the Lyric Opera of Chicago production in the spring of 2025, Missy Mazzoli spoke about sound not merely as material to be shaped, but as an ethical field to be navigated. What emerged was not a set of answers about the opera’s meanings, but a sustained meditation on limits: how far sound can go before it overwhelms agency, how listening can slide from empathy into coercion, and why restraint, rather than immersion, governs the score’s most unsettling decisions.

Listening as an Ethical Act: Conversations with Missy Mazzoli

That emphasis on restraint is crucial, and it runs counter to what one might expect from an opera ostensibly built around an inescapable sonic phenomenon. The temptation, in a work centered around the “global hum,” might be to subject the audience to an equivalent level of saturation, to overwhelm that group of listeners as a means of identification. Mazzoli was explicit that this could not happen.

“How do we represent that sonically?” Mazzoli asked. “How will the audience know that, ‘Oh, that sound — that’s this hum they’ve been talking about?’” In our discussion with guests at the Lyric, Missy deadpanned: “I will give a little bit away: it is electronic. You will hear it three times in the opera. That is the hum. You are hearing the hum.”

The hum had to remain categorically other: unmistakable when it appeared, yet carefully rationed, never allowed to become seductive. The moment sound tips into pleasure or immersion, listening ceases to be a human act and becomes something closer to submission. What matters, then, is not how much the audience hears, but how responsible their listening is allowed to remain.

This distinction clarifies one of the opera’s central paradoxes. The Listeners is about people who cannot escape what they hear, yet it refuses to trap its audience in the same position.

We are never permitted full access to the Listeners’ experience, even if we are not allowed the comfort of total detachment. Instead, the score insists on partial access — a condition that forces judgment rather than empathy alone — to the small series of electronic interventions. The orchestra carries the psychological weight of anticipation and disturbance, while the electronic hum intrudes as a reminder that something exceeds both explanation and control.

Listening becomes an ethical posture rather than a sensory state.

“When you feel like you’re the only person suffering from something, and then someone’s like, ‘Oh no, I suffer from that too … I see that, or I understand’,” Mazzoli confessed, “it’s completely intoxicating.”

Listening is equivalent to perception. One hears or does not hear. Responsibility lies elsewhere: with the speaker, the sound, or the system producing it. This is the default assumption behind much thinking about sound, music, and even opera: that listening is primarily a matter of acoustics, cognition, or affect. To adopt a posture is to position oneself in relation to others. It implies orientation, responsibility, and consequence.

Thus, listening is no longer just about receiving sound. In other words, listening becomes a moral act. As an act, listening can enable care just as intensely as it can facilitate manipulation, discipline, or control.

In The Listeners, no one simply “hears.” Howard listens strategically. The Listeners listen desperately. The audience listens partially, uncertainly, never with full access.

Mazzoli explains: “The hum is something that comes for you and there’s something in your life that you’re refusing to see — something that you’re ignoring — or a destiny that you’re not leading.” Claire listens attentively, but within a structure that already carries authority.

“For Claire,” Mazzoli interjects, “I think that her destiny is to be a leader.” Notwithstanding the unutterable complexities Claire is navigating in the context of Howard’s cult.

Mazzoli’s formulation matters because it relocates “the hum” from a symptom to a summons. Listening is no longer merely perception; it becomes a demand placed on the self, a call that exposes what has been disavowed, and a pressure that can either reconstitute agency or be captured — indeed, driven — by authority.

Without any air of judgment, the opera demonstrates that listening can validate experience, create belonging, authorize belief, and stabilize power structures. Once listening does this kind of work, it cannot be understood as merely a sensory experience. It has ethical weight.

It produces outcomes.

It does not say listening is good or bad.

It says listening is consequential.

Missy Mazzoli in conversation with Justin Vickers (5 April 2025) in the Ardis Krainik Theatre inside the Lyric Opera of Chicago before a performance of The Listeners. Photo © Michael Wolf

Sound, Authority, and the Limits of Immersion in Opera

Seen in this light — as consequential — the opera’s treatment of authority comes into sharper focus.

Howard Bard does not dominate through sonic excess or charismatic musical display. His power operates more quietly, through speech, attention, and the careful regulation of who is heard and under what conditions. The most disturbing scenes in The Listeners are not those in which sound overwhelms, but those in which it recedes, leaving space for persuasion to take hold. Listening itself becomes a resource. It is something that can be allocated, withheld, or instrumentalized.

Referencing the opera’s video confessionals, Mazzoli comments: “Every once in a while, the characters will step in front of a camera and confess their darkest secrets, which is a traditional tactic in cults in order to gain information to blackmail people.”

This incontrovertibly underscores that the opera stages listening as a coercive apparatus.

This understanding ushers me into how I hear the opera’s ending.

Claire’s ascension to leadership could be framed as corrective or hopeful. Unlike Howard, she genuinely hears the hum; and unlike him, she listens. Yet Mazzoli resisted any reading that treated this as resolution, countering: “I’m never really interested in creating good guys/bad guys.” What interested her was not the moral distinction between good and bad leaders, but the persistence of the structure itself. Instead, Mazzoli asserts: “I want people to come out arguing! Is she wholly good or is she secretly evil the whole time?” Authority does not vanish when fraud is exposed, it migrates elsewhere. The opera’s refusal to dismantle the realities of such structures is not pessimistic, but diagnostic.

It recognizes that the desire to be heard — the very impulse that binds the Listeners together — is also what leaves them vulnerable to repetition.

Listening, in this sense, emerges as both remedy and risk. To listen attentively is an ethical good, but it is not ethically sufficient. Without structural safeguards, attentiveness can become indistinguishable from control. The Listeners refuses to resolve that tension, and it is precisely this refusal that gives the opera its unsettling afterlife.

From The Listeners to Lincoln in the Bardo: An Operatic Trajectory

It is in this context that The Listeners  begins to look less like an isolated experiment than a hinge in Mazzoli’s operatic thinking. In conversation, she described the next phase of her work with Royce Vavrek as “sort of a dream project”: an American trilogy of different themes in American history and our present — with The Listeners as the work that makes newly explicit what opera can do when it treats listening not as metaphor but as structure.

Two forthcoming operas extend that inquiry with unusual clarity. The Galloping Cure (Edinburgh International Festival, August 2026) presses the ethical problem of recognition and vulnerability into the terrain of addiction and the opioid crisis. Lincoln in the Bardo (Metropolitan Opera, October 23, 2026) moves into a different register — grief, historical memory, the polyphony of voices that outlast a death — yet it continues the question that both Mahagonny and The Listeners refuse to let us evade: what happens when private disturbance becomes communal utterance, and when communal utterance begins to organize belief.

One reason I do not want these works to appear here as flimsy afterthoughts is that Mazzoli herself repeatedly frames opera’s present as a crossroads of institutional courage — another dimension of listening. In an NPR interview, she describes the post-pandemic landscape in terms that are blunt, and usefully diagnostic: organizations can “either really embrace the new, or retreat into what is old and familiar,” and she treats the present as “an opportunity to really reinvent ourselves.” Read in the wake of The Listeners, that statement does not function as arts-administration commentary. It becomes part of the opera’s afterlife. Commissioning is an ethical decision about attention: whose voices will be amplified, what risks a company will underwrite, and what kinds of listening it is willing to make possible in public.

In other words, these are not loose ends. They are the next testing-ground for the compositional ethics The Listeners forces into view: how much access an audience should be given, what forms of attention become coercive, and what it means for opera to distribute responsibility through sound. That is why I intend to return to both works after their premieres — not as publicity, but as continuation: as further occasions to ask who gets to interpret what we hear, and what forms of authority that interpretation quietly produces.

What remains after the final curtain is not an answer to the hum, but a question about ourselves. Who do we trust to interpret what we hear? When does listening become belief — and thereby, belief obedience? How much of our autonomy are we willing to surrender in exchange for the assurance that someone is finally listening to us?

Those questions do not dissipate when the sound fades. They persist — quietly, insistently — shaping how we hear not only this opera, but the voices that surround us every day. They endure long after the sound has faded.

I contend that listening is never innocent, and that opera — more than any other art form — forces us to confront that fact.

Do you hear it?

A Coda

If The Listeners ultimately unsettles us, it is because it refuses to let listening remain benign. To hear is to enter into relation; to attend is to risk obligation. Across these essays — beginning with Mahagonny and continuing here — listening has emerged not as a metaphor but as a social act with consequences. The question is never simply what is heard, but who is heard, under what conditions, and to what end.

That question will next be taken up from an institutional vantage point. In a forthcoming conversation with Michael Egel, General and Artistic Director of Des Moines Metro Opera, I will turn to the staggering opportunity — and risk — involved in placing new operas at the center of an American company’s artistic identity. Des Moines Metro Opera has been a crucial site for such work, including the premiere of Kristin Kuster’s and librettist Mark Campbell’s A Thousand Acres, a work based on the Jane Smiley novel that figures prominently in my forthcoming book Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900 (in a chapter by Colleen Renihan). That discussion will serve as a hinge: from questions of listening and authority, toward questions of responsibility, stewardship, and the ethics of making space for new voices on the operatic stage.

From there, this inquiry will widen into a multi-part series devoted to children’s opera. Works written for or about children ask us to confront listening at its most ethically charged: listening across asymmetries of power, age, pedagogy, and care, where attention can nurture, but also discipline, shape, and control. If The Listeners exposes how easily listening becomes belief and obedience, children’s opera presses the question further: when does listening become responsibility, and how does opera reckon with that burden without disguising it?

That problem, too, is one opera has never fully resolved — and it is where After the Premiere will now turn.

© Justin Vickers, 2026