Abraham Lincoln was an opera buff.
He attended the opera more than 30 times during his presidency and had a particular affinity for Gounod’s “Faust.” He loved its “Soldiers’ Chorus,” a brassy military march for men returning home from war. The wishful parallel is obvious.
Some of America’s best composers have reciprocated his interest. Philip Glass made Lincoln a character in two of his operatic works — three if you count an animatronic Lincoln — and Charles Ives and Roger Sessions both set poems about the president to music. The most famous tribute is Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait,” which draws on breezy folk tunes and includes spoken text from the Gettysburg Address.
Lincoln’s newest depiction is less sanguine. The composer Missy Mazzoli and the librettist Royce Vavrek, one of the hottest creative teams in opera, conjure a darker, more conflicted president in “Lincoln in the Bardo,” which premiered on Oct. 19 at the Metropolitan Opera.
This is a ghost story with roots in the historical record: When Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, died in the early days of the Civil War, the grief-stricken president visited his mausoleum several times to mourn in private. What took place inside that crypt isn’t known, and it’s into this uncanny gap in the record that the writer George Saunders stepped with his novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo” (2017).
For the opera, Mazzoli, a self-described Civil War buff, used a few Americanisms and created some original material in the style of 19th-century songs to evoke the period. She also added the buzz of kazoos, an American infliction on the world, to inject a little humor into the tragedy.
Lincoln is the opera’s only living character. His arias are monologues — the ghosts can hear him, but he can’t hear them. The score provides insight into his psychology through a variety of compositional “text painting” techniques.
“You get to see into his mind as he’s dealing with some of the issues of the day,” Vavrek said, “and how the loss of his son illuminates the loss of a lot of the young soldiers.”
In his first scene, the president visits Willie’s crypt late at night. He beholds his son’s dead body in its coffin as Willie’s spirit watches in horror, realizing that his father cannot hear him.
The music has an “earthy energy,” Mazzoli said, with complex polyrhythms that divide the same beat into different rhythmic groupings of notes to “ground Lincoln in the reality of the living.” Here, the flute plays a descending line that moves at a different pace than the strings; Lincoln threads his notes between theirs and above a countermelody played by the cellos, bassoon and harp. The score calls for him to sing with a “growly, ugly” and “violent” tone.
“His melodies are very much fragmented,” said the Swedish baritone Peter Mattei, who plays Lincoln.
“There’s something that is very impulsive and alive and honest about his music.”
To honor America’s 250th anniversary, orchestras across the country have been performing Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait” this year, tapping narrators like Hillary Clinton and Matthew McConaughey.
Mazzoli said she avoided overt references to “Lincoln Portrait,” but the source material has a deep connection with Copland. Saunders — who rated himself as a “six out of 10” as a rock guitarist — said that listening to operas by Copland and John Adams helped him develop his approach to building and resolving tension in his stories; he described plot elements in “Bardo” in musical terms like “dissonance” and “consonance.”
“Say you’re in C, and you go to C sharp,” Saunders said. “You carry that tension in your body, even if you don’t know anything about it. Then, when it goes back to C, you relax.”
Mazzoli illustrates Saunders’s point in Lincoln’s music, which relaxes and becomes more consonant when he accepts his son’s death in the second act aria, “Dear Little Chap.”
The shifting polyrhythms are still present, but they are less tangled than before. Major chords “phase in and out of one another” in the strings and winds, Mazzoli said, as Lincoln sits in a chapel and remembers his son. The tempo is faster, and vocal lines tend to ascend rather than descend. The effect is one of brightening.
“There was a question of how to create that sense of relief and lightness in Lincoln’s arias without becoming too saccharine or too overtly joyful at a moment that is still very, very difficult,” she said.
Lincoln carries a new sense of resolve into the opera’s last scene, as he departs from the cemetery on horseback. The spirit of a formerly enslaved Black man named Thomas Havens enters Lincoln’s body and leaves with him. The flutes and harp play a descending line that is a callback to Lincoln’s first aria. Lincoln and Havens sing a final duet in rhythmic unison to close the opera as the president returns his attention to the war.
The opera’s final moments include a determined, pulsing march in the cellos and bass, as violins play eerie descending slides and the brass instruments blare alarm-like chords that crescendo and then abruptly evaporate to reveal a chilling, pregnant silence.
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