Proving Up (Mazzoli) New York 2023 Juilliard School of Music

Information on the Performance

• Work Title: Proving Up   
• Composer: Mazzoli Missy  
• Libretto: Royce Vavrek    Libretto Text, Libretto Index
• Venue & Opera Company: Rosemary and Meredith Willson Theater, New York City, Juilliard School of Music  
• Recorded: February 19, 2023
• Type: Staged Opera Live
• Singers: Joseph Parrish, Julia Stuart, Georgiana Adams, Mary Beth Nelson, Andrew Turner, Trevor Haumschilt, Nazrin Alymann
• Conductor: Steven Osgood  
• Orchestra: Members of the Juilliard Orchestra  
• Stage Director: Mary Birnbaum  
• Stage Designer: Kristen Robinson  
• Costume Designer: Oana Botez  
• Lighting Designer: Yuki Nakase Link  

Information about the Recording

• Format: Streaming
• Quality Video: 4 Audio:4
• Subtitles: yessubs, ensubs  

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS PERFORMANCE

PROGRAM LEAFLET 

Director’s Note By Mary Birnbaum
“Now I understand—this is a dream, a nightmare!” says Miles, our
13-year-old protagonist, as he experiences a blizzard on horseback in late
October somewhere far away from his Nebraska homestead.
How conscious can we afford to be of the systems we are complicit
in? Is it possible to stay open and sensitive to the world in the face of
hopelessness, grief, and failure? These past years have certainly shed light
on the shortcomings of the American Dream and tested our collective will
to go on working to achieve any kind of existential safety. Missy Mazzoli and
Royce Vavrek’s ghostly opera based on Karen Russell’s subtly horrifying
short story centers on one Nebraskan family that has ventured west from
Pennsylvania, incentivized by the Homestead Act of 1862, which was
intended to encourage the settlement of the West by Northerners (poor
white people, free Black people, European immigrants—including a lot of
German immigrants, like the Zegners), formerly enslaved people, and even
single women. This act, meant to equalize land ownership, also ended up
dispossessing many Indigenous people of their land (in Nebraska, it was
the “five civilized tribes,” most notably the Pawnee). You can hear the
ghosts on the arid landscape in Mazzoli’s music and the violence of life on
this land in Vavrek’s and Russell’s words.
Our departure point for the staging was the image of the Zegner family
obsessive circling around the details of staking their claim, counterbalanced
with the vast loneliness of the landscape. If Pa stood on one side of their
160 acres, it would be impossible for him to see the other side at the
same time, a truly unmanageable situation for any farmer in the face of
drought, hail, locusts, snow, and even a scourge of grasshoppers. We
decided that the audience would stand in for the Gamagrass of the libretto,
and the experience of watching would contain aspects of intimacy within a
surprising vastness, an inability to see everything that is happening. From
that point, we started thinking of the piece as a dreamlike installation with
a dream logic. We hope you feel a part of the blue-gray ocean of grass that
obscures and reveals the Zegner family as they work, grieve, struggle, and
dare to hope.

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