A new opera based on George Saunders' Booker Prize-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, opens Monday evening at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. With its supernatural setting — a realm between life and the afterlife — adapting this book would appear to be a major challenge. Yet it's one the show's creators have jumped into enthusiastically.
Even before Lincoln in the Bardo starts, the audience can sense there's something spooky going on. The chandeliers and lights in the Met's vast auditorium flicker, as if possessed. The curtain rises and the audience sees a graveyard at night, with a child walking through it. Suddenly, dozens of people rise from the graves. These are ghosts, who immediately make their unearthly presence known — by playing kazoos.
"Sixty-five brilliant, trained opera singers playing the kazoo," clarifies Missy Mazzoli, composer of Lincoln's music and the first woman composer in the Met's history to have a world premiere on its stage. "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," she says. "And also, to signify that this is not gonna be your typical opera."
The source material, narrated in Saunders' Civil War-era novel by 166 different characters, is certainly fantastical. After Abraham Lincoln's son Willie dies, the boy is stuck in a liminal space, surrounded by spirits who haven't yet moved on to the next realm. A grieving, very much alive Lincoln visits the body in the graveyard, while the spirits — who don't realize they're dead — look on.
"Lincoln in the Bardo, in particular, really lends itself to the operatic stage, in that it's very surreal," Mazzoli says. "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."
Librettist Royce Vavrek, Missy Mazzoli's long-time collaborator, has simplified the narrative arc to focus on five of the characters. "It was really, really, really fun to get to sort of streamline," Vavrek explains, "but with the pure intention of keeping George's unbelievable imagination alive in this document that he gave us, that became our gospel."
One featured character is the Reverend, played by dramatic soprano Christine Goerke in mutton chops and a fancy suit. Goerke is better known for her performances in operas by Wagner and Strauss; this is the first role she's premiered, a part that Mazzoli crafted specially for her voice. The Reverend is the only person in the bardo who knows he's dead.
"It gives the Reverend the opportunity to do the thing that he does the best, which is shepherd people," Goerke says. "Nothing has changed in terms of what he does for people. The opportunity to save Willie and to help Lincoln through this, that is what he has done in his life."
Director Lileana Blain-Cruz says this story, suffused throughout with both pain and hope, poses some very specific challenges in its staging. "A soul needs to enter into another soul," she says, "and then these tendrils need to come out, and then the child needs to go through a roof, and then people need to explode and disappear into another realm. How do you do that?"
It turns out there are several answers: puppets, pyrotechnics, some simple stage magic. Mazzoli's orchestration contributes to the illusions as well.
"Members in the bardo are sort of exploding," the composer says. "'Matterlightblooming' is the term that George made up for this, when you sort of explode into the next phase of existence — into heaven, hell, the afterlife, whatever. So, peppered in this texture are these explosive orchestral moments."
Abraham Lincoln is in a kind of bardo of his own — mourning the death of his son, but also realizing how many other fathers and mothers will mourn their children in the course of the war. "I don't think you ever get over the grief of losing a child," Mazzoli says, 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."
An opera about dead people — and, in particular, a child— needing to move on in the afterlife might sound depressing, but the creators are confident that audiences will see light in its dark corners. "It's a strangely inviting universe," Blain-Cruz says. "The subject is full of life and joy, as much as it is about grief."
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