“Proving Up” doesn’t start like most operas. The first thing we hear is a baritone, alone, singing a real 19th-century ditty with the line, “For Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm.”
Written by the composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek, the taut, 80-minute drama follows the Zegners, a family hoping to secure a slice of the Nebraskan frontier.
Per the Homestead Act of 1862, the only things standing between them and landownership are proof of five years of harvest, and a house with a glass window. But for the Zegners, those material successes prove to be as fragile as that glass window.
After the haunting “Manifest Destiny” song opens the opera, the orchestra layers in progressively under the singer. As new notes fill out the harmony — hazy and brooding — it becomes clear that this jaunty tune is not what it seems. A deeper, more complex reality churns underneath. Is Uncle Sam rich enough to give everyone a farm? And who was excluded from that vision?
“Proving Up” was supposed to wheel its way to Chicago three years ago, when it was scheduled as part of Lyric Opera’s 2021/22 season. That production would have come on the heels of Mazzoli’s three-year residency at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But a surge in COVID-19 forced Lyric to postpone, then cancel the production.
That left Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music to take up the mantle, at a time when the opera’s interrogation of the American dream feels acutely timely, and painful. Students and staff will present the opera’s Chicago-area premiere Thursday through Sunday at the university’s Ryan Center for the Musical Arts.
“I think this is an ideal piece for conservatories and universities,” Mazzoli said on a video call from her home in New York. “It has one of each voice type. It deals with themes about history and belonging. And it being a particularly American story is also great for students [at an American university].”
“Proving Up” has been staged at other conservatories, from Juilliard in New York to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Whenever a new college production arises, Mazzoli and Vavrek host a virtual roundtable with students to discuss the opera.
Bienen master’s student Mc Jefferson Agloro participated in that discussion. Agloro sees parallels between the drive of his character — Pa Zegner, the family patriarch — and the archetype of the “padre de pamilya,” or head of the family, in Filipino culture.
“Where I come from, it’s so common to have this sense of moving forward by going abroad,” Agloro said. “We go somewhere [else] to achieve the American dream.”
Alan Pierson, the production’s conductor and co-director of Northwestern’s Contemporary Music Ensemble, considers “Proving Up” a “contemporary American masterpiece.”
“American folk music is all through it. [There’s] guitars, harmonicas, drums, folk fiddling. There’s all these really fresh sounds that are not what you expect in an opera,” he said.
Mazzoli, 45, grew up in Lansdale, Penn., 20 miles north of Philadelphia. Years later, she watched neighbors lose their homes in the 2008 financial crisis.
“The emphasis placed on home ownership where I grew up—that was the whole goal,” she said. “It was this obsession that I never even really thought about until the bubble burst.”
Anxieties around homeownership also run through “Proving Up.” In theory, the Homestead Act promised 160 acres to anyone, so long as they passed inspection at the end of their five-year “proving up” period. In reality, one in two homesteads failed.
Alec Fore, the Bienen master’s student who plays Miles Zegner — the family’s youngest son, who is forced to grow up quickly over the course of the opera — says the opera’s historical frame was eye-opening.
“There are very few times in American history when it hasn’t been a struggle to achieve the American dream,” he said.
The Zegners face plenty of trials themselves. Their two daughters die at some point during their five years on the frontier; the girls return as impish phantoms, commenting on the stage action like a giggling, two-person Greek chorus. Pa Zegner succumbs to drink, while their elder son descends into illness, madness or both — Vavrek leaves his affliction open to interpretation. And that’s all in the first few minutes of the opera.
“We tell the stories of the people that succeed, but built into that dream is the fact that it needs losers,” said Northwestern opera director Joachim Schamberger, also the production’s stage director. “Because if everybody wins, it’s not a dream anymore.”
The long-awaited arrival of “Proving Up” at Northwestern is poetic in another respect: Karen Russell, whose 2013 short story inspired the opera, graduated from the university in 2003. She, Mazzoli and Vavrek will intersect again for “The Galloping Cure,” an allegory about the opioid epidemic. That opera premieres in the U.K. next year.
For Mazzoli and Vavrek — who is basing the “Cure” libretto off a new story by Russell — that crisis is personal. Mazzoli lost two cousins to overdoses, and her hometown has been hit hard by the opioid crisis. Likewise, Vavrek’s late father grappled with addiction.
“This is not a headline. This is something that we live with,” Mazzoli said.
Mazzoli now identifies “Proving Up” as the turning point that sparked her interest in telling uniquely American stories. Around the same time as the premiere of “The Galloping Cure,” the Metropolitan Opera in New York will premiere “Lincoln in the Bardo,” her co-adaptation, with Vavrek, of the novel of the same name by George Saunders. The novel is a fantastical account of Abraham Lincoln’s grief for his son, Willie, who died a year into the Civil War.
That opera’s setting in “a particularly divided America” once again resonates in our own time, Mazzoli said.
“I’m on this kick of writing about themes that, again, are not limited to America. But we’re really the canary in the coal mine, because it’s seeping out to the rest of the world,” she said.