Opera benefits from simplicity. It is an art form of elastic time, of actions and emotions compressed and stretched to elevate drama to something more like a dream.
Because of that, plots tend to be straightforward, making room for the music to add complication and transcendence. Wagner’s four-part, epic “Ring” may run more than 15 hours, but it could be summarized in just a few minutes.
Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” is not simple. Its more than 600 pages teem with World War II-era action and lofty themes about Americanness, Jewishness, love, death and, above all, pop culture’s ability to change lives. This is the stuff of fiction that aspires to literary greatness.
Does it also have the makings of an opera? The composer Mason Bates thinks so.
His adaptation, with the librettist Gene Scheer, opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Sunday. It was an evening that started with statements from Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, in defense of free speech and artistic expression, which they described as under attack. (They were met with a mix of boos and applause; one audience member yelled at Schumer to “do something about it.”) “Kavalier & Clay,” Gelb said, is a testament to the power of art against oppression.
That may be placing more weight on the opera than it can support. Like a skipping stone, Bates’s adaptation bounces across Chabon’s novel while never really plunging into it, for a treatment that is both too much for opera and not enough: too much plot, not enough transcendence.
Scheer has wrestled with big books before; he also adapted Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” and Herman Melville’s constellatory “Moby-Dick,” both of which have played at the Met. He knows how to craft a story, but what often gets lost in translation is a sense of the meaning or even purpose for telling it.
In the case of “Kavalier & Clay,” Scheer broadly traces the arcs of its title characters: Joe Kavalier’s flight to the United States from Nazi-occupied Prague and the Holocaust; the creation of a comic book hero, the Escapist, with his cousin Sam Clay; and their respective romances, Joe’s with the enterprising artist Rosa Saks, which is threatened by his trauma, and Sam’s with the actor Tracy Bacon, which is thwarted by gay shame.
All this is packed into two and a half hours, and to pull it off Scheer often resorts to cliché. Sam’s desire is expressed with the unpoetic banality of “I have a secret / I don’t want what other guys want.” And one of the characters, a one-note villain named Gerhard, stands in for the entirety of Nazism, given an Iago-like “Credo” aria in which he explains his worldview. He condemns the idea that art can make a difference and declaring that “bullets are all that matter.” Joseph Goebbels probably wouldn’t agree.
Like a novelist, Scheer doesn’t shy from moving briskly among locations in Prague, New York and the Western Front, sometimes presenting them simultaneously. Bartlett Sher, a seasoned Broadway director with a talent for seamless elegance, wrangles everything into a smooth, visually cohesive production that blends realism and sliding panels on which 59 Studios projects stylized animations.
There are some design missteps; the Clay family’s building in Brooklyn looks more like a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and many of the scenes in Europe conjure the Holocaust with glib signifiers of a concentration camp, down to striped prisoner uniforms. But the projections pay off in thrillingly filmic moments that reveal how a pencil’s sketches can open into an entirely new world. And Sher makes scenic transitions, even from the top of the Empire State Building in a lightning storm to a crowded party in an art gallery, look as easy as the flip of a comic book page.
Among the singers Sher is working with here are Met veterans, but also some performers making their debuts, most prominently the baritone Andrzej Filonczyk as Joe. He has an earnest, youthful sound but spends much of the opera as almost a cipher. His lines tell you how he feels, but the vocal writing is so nondescript, you just have to take his word for it.
More animated is the tenor Miles Mykkanen’s Sam, who is given a dynamic role that he rises to with bright excitement and captivating expressiveness. Similarly commanding is the mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce as Rosa, with the look and charisma of Mrs. Maisel. Some of the opera’s finest moments bring Sam and Rosa together, left behind by the men they love and making a new, modern life for themselves.
The cast is large, and includes the soprano Lauren Snouffer as Joe’s little sister, Sarah (a change of gender from the novel), who, like him, is give little variation with which to make an impression; you could say the same for the bass-baritone Craig Colclough as Gerhard, the Nazi. The baritone Edward Nelson, as Tracy, has a charming warmth and visible comfort in a role that requires an actor’s confidence and readiness to dance, which few opera singers can pull off without embarrassing themselves.
Bates seems to have the most musical fun in scenes with Sam and Tracy, like that dance, lending them a big-band sound and, in one case, a chattering chorus that plays on the suggestive first name of a character named Dick Johnson. And their first kiss, shared atop the Empire State Building, is cinematically grand.
So is much else in this opera, conducted with relish by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director. Bates has built his reputation on combining symphonic and electronic music, giving him a veneer of cool that belies a likable harmlessness. His score is almost always obvious, guiding a listener’s thoughts and emotions as a soundtrack would, rather than complicating them with layers of dramatic nuance.
The opening scene, in 1939 Prague, starts with an ominous low note and martial percussion. A busy office is accompanied by typewriters, and the name Superman is sung with a long, airborne melody. Salvador Dalí appears briefly at the art gallery with exactly the puckish, comedic tone you’d expect, and the opera reaches its harmonious conclusion with a chord that could have ended any film from Hollywood’s Golden Age.
At its most exciting, but also its most unimaginative, Bates’s score depicts the Escapist with soaring-strings, brassy, blockbuster heroism, cribbing Danny Elfman’s soundtracks for Tim Burton’s “Batman” and Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” movies. Perhaps it’s fitting that this music is also purely symphonic, accompanying video rather than singers.
Bates’s music can be skillful, even enjoyable. But it is also forgettable, in the way that much contemporary opera at the Met has been since the company re-emerged from the pandemic. There are exceptions, such as Brett Dean’s “Hamlet” and Kaija Saariaho’s shattering masterpiece “Innocence,” which will have its Met premiere later this season.
The prevailing house style, though, is a reach for topicality, like race and sexuality in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” drone warfare in “Grounded” and the antifascist power of art in “Kavalier & Clay.” This is admirable, but it’s often executed with toothless scores that ask so little of their audiences, they would just be background entertainment anywhere else.
That’s not what opera is. Its heightened form of life and storytelling takes hold of your attention, and has the power to utterly overwhelm you. But only at its best.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Through Oct. 11 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
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