EIF 2026 - Mazzoli's The Galloping Cure, or, In the Shadow of Past Glory

 Back in 2019 the EIF brought Mazzoli's opera Breaking the Waves to Edinburgh. I found that work a powerful dramatic experience and have been keenly looking forward to this new commission. Although this new opera starts strongly I'm afraid I found it increasingly unpersuasive as a drama. 

In this case Karen Russell (story) and Royce Vavrek (libretto) place us in small town America where for reasons that never become entirely clear all the inhabitants are unwell, and local doctor Theresa Hart (Daniela Mack) is overwhelmed. I assumed that the authors wanted to hint at associations with Trumpified America and at post-Covid distrust of medical professionals but the treatment remains perhaps just a shade too generic to really hit home. Into this situation arrives Lucky Mack (Justin Austin) a very recognisable American huckster. He has a merry-go-round, rides on which seem to miraculously cure all the townsfolks' ailments. Clearly from the pre-publicity, though I'm much more doubtful that the work establishes this without that pre-publicity, this is intended to speak to the opioid crisis. There's also I think a broader comment intended on our dependence on isolating technologies through the HomeHorse of Act Two. Finally we have the subsidiary plot of Hart's difficult relationship with her teenage daughter Noy (finely performed by Gabrielle Turgeon) and struggle to care for her baby grand-daughter Rose.

In contrast to Breaking the Waves where the combination of Mazzoli's music and the compelling drama transcended echoes from other composers here I was much less persuaded. A number of past voices occurred to me - Copland, Bernstein, Adams in the music, The Music Man's Harold Hill in Mack, Britten's Animals (Paul Bunyan) in the dogs. The reason this work is much less successful in banishing or transcending its predecessors is, I think, the weaknesses in the drama. I was also doubtful about moments when Mazzoli turns to sprechgesang, and her inclusion of club beats (Blume, Lorna Dune) - rather than augmenting the music, it felt more that musical inspiration had fallen short.

Coming back to those dramatic weaknesses. Key issues here are with pacing and the decisions of the creators about what to show and not to show (warning, spoilers follow). So in Act Three the payments Mack demands from the townsfolk in return for continued access to their HomeHorses are body parts - hair, kneecaps, eyes, tongue. To me, it felt that we leapt to this point too rapidly and I wasn't sufficiently persuaded that the spell of either Mack or his treatment was strong enough to compel these people to these sacrifices. When daughter Noy gives up everything but baulks at sacrificing her tongue (offstage which is a further issue) the drama hasn't done sufficient to establish why she has this willpower to partially resist but nobody else does. Other factors that may be involved here are the design of the HomeHorses (Rebecca Ringst) - the performers commit themselves fully and Leah Hausman (Movement) also does her best, but it never really became clear for me how these objects were building the addiction and I just was never sufficiently persuaded by the whole conceit. Another issue is Justin Austin's performance, he's not helped by the writing (particularly at the end, a point we'll come on to) but he needed a physical presence and a vocal weight equal to Mack to convince as a rival authority (and indeed ultimately the person who bests her) and in this regard I wasn't ultimately convinced.

But the most serious problem occurs at the end. Noy, reconciled with her mother, dies in her arms. Remembering the baby (alone at home) Hart rushes back to discover Mack waiting for her. He now seems to want to claim the baby and set up home with her. That he might want the baby for medical experiments is one thing but his sudden desire for some kind of family life with Hart I found completely dramatically unpersuasive. Nothing up to that point has suggested any such desire - he's just been written as a rather one dimensional snake oil salesman/Hammer Horroresque surgeon - and Mack's Hart has such presence that I already didn't quite believe she'd have endorsed the treatment as she does at the top of Act Two. But I really could not believe that Hart would consider a future life with him, as the ambiguous ending seems to imply, when he's just killed her daughter.

One clever device that must be mentioned, though, is Mazzoli and Vavrek's humorous treatment of the animals - the dogs wiser than their mistress, the singing sheep. Catriona Hewitson and Edward Jowle as the two dogs are superb. This achieves in places that rarely seen thing, genuinely funny opera. But it doesn't achieve the depth of feeling that the best production of Britten's Paul Bunyan I've seen found in Fido's relationship with Inkslinger, or Britten/Auden's haunting commentary on America of the Litany.

A couple of other comments on the text - there's the obligatory (for contemporary work) swearing, plus some attempt to capture a youthful slang - both sounded a bit laboured to my ear. Similarly, as the evening went on I felt the use of horse riding terms to describe the experience of addiction was overdone. 

I've mentioned several individuals already, and I really want to emphasise what a commanding singing-acting performance Daniela Mack gives. The minor parts are all well taken with those individuals also providing a focused, powerful chorus. The Scottish Opera Orchestra play finely, and the whole is ably conducted by Stuart Stratford who finds that sense of forward momentum crucial to great opera and does his best to tide us over some of the issues with the work. 

The overall look of the piece, apart from the HomeHorses, by Ringst, Christina Cunningham (Costumes) and Lucy Carter (Lighting) works solidly, but perhaps the overall rather spare design, combined with the generic aspects of the work contributes to not quite capturing that entity that is both a specific community and one that can stand for broader humanity - in contrast to Breaking the Waves which really achieved that.

Overall, this is worth seeing, particularly for Mack's powerful central performance and for the animals, but as a work it doesn't reach the same standard as Breaking the Waves.