George Saunders’s novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” is full of lines that leave a lump in your throat. My favorite comes near the end, after a mass migration to the other side, when a few lingering souls not ready to cross over wake up and discover that they “had again been granted the great mother-gift: time. More time.”
What is opera if not a granting of that gift? It is an art form of distorted time. Single emotions burst into set pieces. You watch, and feel, Madama Butterfly wait an entire night in just minutes. Death takes as long as a character needs to say a proper goodbye.
That’s one reason “Lincoln in the Bardo,” since its publication almost a decade ago, has been a book in search of an opera. Another is its imaginative form, a blend of ghostly colloquy and historical citation, rendered on the page like a script as if begging for adaptation.
Well, its moment has arrived. Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s “Lincoln in the Bardo” premiered on Monday at the Metropolitan Opera, and it’s as funny, strange and big-hearted as the novel, with a lavishly inspired production by Lileana Blain-Cruz to match. Saunders’s cartoonish and chaotic vision of the bardo, that realm between life and whatever comes next, is in good hands.
Monday was also a milestone for the Met, if accidentally. The company has commissioned an opera by a woman before, but it has never premiered one. “Lincoln” was supposed to play at the Los Angeles Opera first, but that was canceled and Mazzoli found herself in the position of making her Met debut, as well as Met history, on the same night.
She is worthy of the honor. Mazzoli and Vavrek, the librettist, are among the finest partnerships in opera today. They have a sincere, intelligent feel for theater, which is surprisingly rare in contemporary opera. They know how to entertain audiences, but they also know how to push them, with fearless curiosity about what is possible in this anything-goes, dreamy art form.
Together, since “Proving Up” in 2018, they have also been crafting a new kind of operatic Americana, darkly surreal and at times so nightmarish you can only find comfort in an uneasy laugh. Their characters are American searchers and strivers, wanting homeownership (“Proving Up”), community (“The Listeners”) and relief from pain (“The Galloping Cure”). But they fall victim to malignant forces beyond their control: prairie monsters, cult leaders, predatory doctors and, in the case of “Lincoln,” death itself.
In adapting “Lincoln,” Mazzoli and Vavrek have stuck closely to the novel’s plot. At the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln loses his young son Willie. Unaware that he has died, Willie finds himself in the bardo surrounded by spirits who help him move on because “the young are not meant to tarry” there. Saunders populates his story with well over four score and seven characters and historical sources, but those have been streamlined in the opera.
Gone are the accounts of Willie’s illness and burial, but Mazzoli and Vavrek successfully translate the sensibility of the book. Saunders’s writing is hilariously crass yet poetic, threaded with profound humanism and punctuated by swerves toward the cosmic. Vavrek’s librettos tend to have a similarly artful vulgarity. It’s no surprise that “Lincoln” opens with ghosts chattering about poop. Vavrek takes on the distinct voice of each character with ease, and he leaves room for the small details that make the novel so powerful, as when three spirits sing a list of what they remember from the living world: mundane things like beer froth and the tuft of a rug.
Mazzoli’s score is rich with analogues to Saunders’s style. She has the chorus of ghosts sigh into kazoos; she musicalizes hiccups and laughter; her directions for Mr. and Mrs. Baron (Craig Colclough and Stephanie Blythe), a Thénardier-like couple of abusive parents buried in a potter’s field, include “sempre drunk.” Horror-movie sound effects, animatedly emerging from the orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, serve a dramatic purpose but also wink with comedy.
Musically speaking, the bardo is slippery. High strings creep into the opening scenes like the fog onstage. They also slide around, bending pitches with glissando gestures that permeate the chorus, too. If the opera has any grounding force, it’s a short motif heard at the beginning in a violin solo. Mazzoli repeats the theme throughout the show; it’s there before we meet any spirits, and it’s there after they depart, the permanent sound of an impermanent place.
Some roles seem tailored to members of the cast. The countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo has a cameo as the teenager Miss Elise Traynor, a cautionary tale of what happens when the young tarry in the bardo; he is made to sing stuttering fragments and erratic intervals, but is also given long, harrowingly ornamented lines that play to his experience in Baroque opera. The baritone Peter Mattei, as Lincoln (who doesn’t speak in the novel but is a major character here), is given long, aching melodies well suited to the liquid warmth of his tone. His performance was a high point of the night.
Lincoln’s tender music is all the more affecting juxtaposed with the innocently pure sound of Willie (on opening night, an amplified Everett Sobers). Guiding Willie are three ghosts: Vollman (the resonant bass-baritone Ryan McKinny), who was struck by a falling beam the day he was finally to sleep with his wife; Bevins (the bright tenor Jonah Hoskins), who was driven to suicide by unrequited gay love; and the Reverend (the often scene-stealing soprano Christine Goerke in drag), who has already had a glimpse of final judgment.
There are guides of a sort for Lincoln, too, in the anonymous Black section of the cemetery, where the eternally bitter enslaved woman Francis Hodge (Janai Brugger) protects the silent and traumatized Litzie (Viviana Goodwin). A freed man, Thomas Havens (a heroic Joshua Blue), eventually inhabits Lincoln, imbuing him with the compassion to later issue the Emancipation Proclamation.
All this unfolds on a towering set, by Adam Rigg, of lanky trees and the mossy ground of a cemetery out of “Beetlejuice”: Everything is tinted by green, purple and yellow light (by Yi Zhao and Stacey Derosier), and everyone wears rotting death as an accessory with Montana Levi Blanco’s period costumes.
Blain-Cruz, often a thrilling maximalist, has turned the Met into a haunted house that greets its audience with a spooky soundscape (by Kate Marvin) and an inner curtain made of black lace. The cemetery is crowded with James Ortiz’s whimsical puppetry, projections by Hannah Wasileski and Hana S Kim, and stylized movement by Raja Feather Kelly that fits the production’s vocabulary more than his intrusively extravagant choreography. It’s a minor misstep in a show that otherwise teems with stage magic.
The spirits’ departure from the bardo is an explosive phenomenon called the matterlightbloom, depicted by Jeremy Chernick like colorful fireworks and a magician’s puff of smoke. When they leave en masse, the climax is as visual as it is narrative.
But Blain-Cruz saves one more bit of spectacle for the very end: a live horse, trotting across the stage. Lincoln is in the saddle, but we know that Havens is with him, riding off to change the course of American history.
Lincoln in the Bardo
Through Nov. 14 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.
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