The Metropolitan Opera opened its world premiere adaptation of George Saunders’ novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” on Oct. 19, with music by Missy Mazzoli translating the book’s surreal take on grief into sound. The “Lincoln in the Bardo” opera also makes Mazzoli the first woman composer in the company’s history to have a world premiere on its stage, according to NPR.
The production runs through Nov. 14 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, including a Halloween performance. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts, Lileana Blain-Cruz directs and baritone Peter Mattei leads the cast as Abraham Lincoln, joined by soprano Christine Goerke, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe and countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo as residents of the bardo. The Met is presenting the work during the nation’s 250th anniversary.
Saunders’ 2017 novel, which won the Booker Prize, is told through 166 different narrators and centers on the death of Willie Lincoln, the president’s 11-year-old son. In the book, Willie lingers in the bardo, a realm between life and whatever comes next, where the spirits around him refuse to accept they are dead. Meanwhile, his grief-stricken father keeps returning to the cemetery to visit the boy’s body.
How the opera opens and what it signals
Mazzoli chose an unusual entry point: 65 opera singers playing the kazoo. The ghostly buzz is meant to pull listeners out of ordinary reality from the first notes.
“I really wanted to start this opera with a sound that signals to the listener that we are not quite in everyday reality — we are in another realm of some sort,” Mazzoli told NPR. “And also, to signify that this is not gonna be your typical opera.”
She also sees the novel’s blend of the real and the otherworldly as a natural fit for the art form. “‘Lincoln in the Bardo,’ in particular, really lends itself to the operatic stage, in that it’s very surreal,” Mazzoli said. “We have one foot in reality, but one foot very much not. … And I think that those sorts of stories really come to life on the stage.”
Streamlining 166 narrators into five
A novel told in 166 voices doesn’t fit neatly on a stage, so something had to give. Librettist Royce Vavrek, who has worked with Mazzoli for years, pared the story down to five central characters while protecting the spirit of Saunders’ original text.
“It was really, really, really fun to get to sort of streamline, but with the pure intention of keeping George’s unbelievable imagination alive in this document that he gave us, that became our gospel,” Vavrek told NPR.
Translating grief into music
Saunders coined the word “matterlightblooming” for the moment a spirit leaves the bardo for whatever lies beyond. In Mazzoli’s score, those departures become literal bursts of sound. The composer told NPR that the bardo’s residents are “sort of exploding” as they cross over, and she peppered the orchestral texture with explosive moments to match.
Willie isn’t the only one stuck between worlds. The opera’s Lincoln mourns his son while carrying the weight of every parent who will lose a child before the Civil War ends. Mazzoli said that reckoning becomes a turning point for the president rather than an ending.
“I don’t think you ever get over the grief of losing a child,” Mazzoli told NPR, but “pulling himself up in order to go back to work, and to commit himself to the task of ending the Civil War … sort of cracks him open. This experience in the graveyard gives him the strength and the compassion and the empathy to go on and commit himself to healing the country.”
Finding light in a story about death
The subject matter is heavy by design. The opera deals directly with the dead, including a child who must learn to let go of life. Even so, the creative team expects audiences to find warmth in the darkness. Blain-Cruz told NPR the piece is as full of life and joy as it is of grief.
Readers who want to catch the adaptation have until Nov. 14. Tickets and the full performance schedule are on the Met’s website.
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