Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 8 - The Listeners

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 24 Longing to Belong The Listeners considers the power of sound itself, and confronts the dangers of following a charismatic leader at all costs. by Justin Vickers 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. The opera critiques sociopolitical structures that take advantage of the defenseless, illustrating how sound — both real and imagined — can become a catalyst for manipulation, coercion, and the construction of alternative realities. Sometimes we may hear a noise that we can’t quite put our finger on. A nondescript din. We may simply put music on in the background to mask the sound of a hum. Maybe that hum is a clinical side-effect, a ringing in the inner ear. But when is it something more? Vavrek crafted his libretto for The Listeners based on an original story by fellow-Canadian author and playwright Jordan Tannahill. A three-company commission from the Norwegian National Opera (where the opera was premiered in September 2022), Opera Philadelphia (which staged the U.S. premiere in September 2024), and Lyric Opera of Chicago, the work is Mazzoli and Vavrek’s fourth collaboration of six total. Songs from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt (2012) began their critically acclaimed run, followed by Breaking the Waves (2016) and Proving Up (2018). Both the Metropolitan Opera commission for an operatic adaptation of George Saunders’s novel Lincoln