Proving Up

Join us for the UK premiere of Proving Up, a new opera by acclaimed composer Missy Mazzoli. Set on the vast, unforgiving plains of 1870s Nebraska, it offers a haunting reflection on the American Dream and the human desire to make a life in a hostile world.

Inspired by Karen Russell’s short story, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, the opera follows the Zegner family as they strive to fulfil the rigid demands of the Homestead Act in order to claim ownership of the land they have settled. Among these requirements, one stands out with a powerful symbolic weight: a single glass window. 

When their eldest son is left incapacitated, the family sends their youngest child, Miles, across the prairie on a perilous journey to share the window with neighbouring homesteaders awaiting a government inspection. As Miles moves through an immense and indifferent landscape, he encounters forces – human and otherwise – that expose the brutal tension between hope, survival and sacrifice. 

Premiered in 2016, Proving Up marked a defining moment in Missy Mazzoli’s operatic career. A Grammy-nominated composer described by The New York Times as ‘one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York’, Mazzoli has created a body of stage works acclaimed for their visceral emotional power and distinctive contemporary voice, including Breaking the Waves and The Listeners. 

Scored for a striking chamber ensemble that includes suspended acoustic guitars, Proving Up unfolds in a sound world that is at once intimate and disquieting, amplifying themes of fragility, endurance and loss.