The Galloping Cure by Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli Featured by the BBC
Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli.
The Galloping Cure, an opera by Missy Mazzoli, composer in residence at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, was featured on the BBC’s Radio 4: Front Row. A collaboration between Mazzoli and author and Bard Fiction Prize winner Karen Russell, The Galloping Cure is based on a short story by Russell that was inspired by Kafka’s short story “A Country Doctor.” The opera is an allegory for the opioid crisis in which a mysterious carousel cures a town of its illnesses but becomes more expensive and addictive as time passes. The Edinburgh International Festival, where the opera premiered, described it as “visually stunning and emotionally gripping… [evoking] a darkly funny and devastating vision of a crumbling society.”
Mazzoli spoke with the BBC about her opera, which they describe as “sometimes elegiac, sometimes… dystopian.” “Opera is inherently multimedia [and] immersive,” Mazzoli said. Her research involved riding on and listening to carousels in Paris and Coney Island in New York, to “make the audience feel like they were on a carousel [by] recreating this doppler effect.” Although The Galloping Cure is about a serious subject, “it’s not moralistic, it’s not dour… my goal is that people come out of it having more of a language to discuss something that’s very hard to talk about. Losing someone to addiction, it’s very hard to have the words for it. So my attempt to talk about it was to make this piece.”
The Galloping Cure premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival earlier this month. Mazzoli’s next opera Lincoln in the Bardo, which is based on the novel by George Saunders, will premiere in October at the Metropolitan Opera, the first opera by a woman to do so.
Post Date: 08-18-2026
Mazzoli spoke with the BBC about her opera, which they describe as “sometimes elegiac, sometimes… dystopian.” “Opera is inherently multimedia [and] immersive,” Mazzoli said. Her research involved riding on and listening to carousels in Paris and Coney Island in New York, to “make the audience feel like they were on a carousel [by] recreating this doppler effect.” Although The Galloping Cure is about a serious subject, “it’s not moralistic, it’s not dour… my goal is that people come out of it having more of a language to discuss something that’s very hard to talk about. Losing someone to addiction, it’s very hard to have the words for it. So my attempt to talk about it was to make this piece.”
The Galloping Cure premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival earlier this month. Mazzoli’s next opera Lincoln in the Bardo, which is based on the novel by George Saunders, will premiere in October at the Metropolitan Opera, the first opera by a woman to do so.
Post Date: 08-18-2026