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Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie died in 1862, while the Civil War was tearing the country apart. In George Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo, the boy remains among the dead, inhabiting a cemetery crowded with restless voices. It is an unusual foundation for an opera, though perhaps an apt one: people who cannot let go, speaking all at once, are familiar operatic company.
The Metropolitan Opera has turned Saunders’s 2017 novel into a new work by composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek. The production opened October 19 and continues through November 14. Peter Mattei sings Lincoln, with Christine Goerke as the Reverend and Anthony Roth Costanzo as Miss Elise Traynor. Lileana Blain-Cruz directs; Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts.
The source novel is as interested in the people surrounding Willie as in the bereaved president. Its cemetery narrators are variously boastful, frightened, uncomprehending and tender. For the opera, the intriguing question is how a stage full of competing testimonies becomes drama rather than noise. Music can give simultaneous voices a shape that prose, however inventive, can only suggest.
There is also a particularly American tension in the material. Lincoln is both a monumental public figure and a father facing an entirely private catastrophe. Saunders’s invention was to put those identities in the same graveyard, without allowing either to resolve the other. The opera inherits the challenge: not merely to humanize a president, but to dramatize the distance between the nation’s grief and his own.
Mazzoli has built a career out of bringing unsettled minds to the stage. This work enters the Met’s repertory amid an unusually ambitious season that also includes a new Jenůfa and a company premiere of Silent Night. The question is not whether contemporary opera can borrow literary prestige, but whether it can find something in a novel that only singing can reveal.
Onstage: Metropolitan Opera, through November 14. Season and production information.
The Metropolitan Opera House. Photograph: Yair Haklai / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
