Missy Mazzoli, Death Doula, Prepares 'Lincoln in the Bardo' at the Met

By Elena Vasquez

Missy Mazzoli's opera Lincoln in the Bardo premieres next week at the Metropolitan Opera. In an interview with Vogue ahead of the premiere, Mazzoli disclosed a biographical fact that reframes how the work should be heard: she is a certified death doula.

The admission is not a sideline. Mazzoli told Vogue that much of her work is about "empathy and being able to sit beside someone." She applied that practice directly to the opera's cast. "I essentially had to 'doula' all the characters, imagining what their preoccupations might be," she said.

What is the opera about?

Mazzoli located the core of the piece in a simultaneous experience of opposites. She described it as "that simultaneous deep loneliness, loss, being in a kind of purgatorial realm, and also this deep propensity for light and love and humor."

The statement carries weight because it names the opera's dramatic mechanism. Lincoln in the Bardo, adapted from George Saunders's novel, situates its characters in a transitional state between life and death. Mazzoli's phrasing — purgatorial realm, loneliness, loss — maps that territory directly. Her claim that humor and love run alongside grief signals the tonal balance the production will ask audiences to hold.

The takeaway in plain words: the composer sees the opera as a study in sitting with dying, not merely depicting it.

Why does the doula credential matter?

A death doula is trained to accompany the dying and their families — emotionally, not medically. Mazzoli's certification means the opera's empathetic architecture draws on practiced end-of-life work, not research alone.

Her verb choice is the tell. She did not write the characters; she "doula'd" them. That word choice shifts the compositional act from invention to accompaniment. She imagined each figure's preoccupations, then stayed beside them — the discipline she brings to real deaths.

The Met premiere next week gives that method its largest test to date, on the opera house's biggest stage.

What did Vogue's interview reveal?

Three concrete points emerged:

• Lincoln in the Bardo premieres next week at the Met.
• Mazzoli is a certified death doula.
• She describes the work's core as combining "deep loneliness, loss" in a "purgatorial realm" with a "deep propensity for light and love and humor."

Each quote comes verbatim from the composer herself, in conversation with Vogue.

The plain-words takeaway: this premiere arrives with an unusually direct line between the composer's training and her subject matter.

What should audiences watch for?

The premiere next week will show whether Mazzoli's doula method — sitting beside her characters rather than judging them — translates into sound an audience can sit inside too. Her stated balance of purgatory and humor gives listeners the measure: if the score holds grief and levity at once, it has done what its composer trained for.