The Space Between

In his sprawling 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, author George Saunders ushered readers into the shadowy realm separating this life from the next, introducing a chaotic cast of lost souls who called this netherworld home. This fall, his seminal work will be reincarnated on the Met stage as a genre-defying, life-affirming new opera by the remarkable composer-librettist team of Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek.

Missy Mazzoli is a composer at the peak of her powers, with half a dozen operas to her credit, commissions from orchestras stretching from New York to Los Angeles and beyond, and a trophy case boasting three Grammy nominations and Musical America’s 2022 Composer of the Year award. Now add to her resume a major, eagerly anticipated Metropolitan Opera world premiere, as she arrives at the Met with the work she calls “by far the most complex opera I’ve written,” an adaptation of George Saunders’s much-lauded novel Lincoln in the Bardo. The project reunites Mazzoli with longtime collaborator librettist Royce Vavrek, with whom she previously created four operas, including the award-winning Breaking the Waves in 2016.

Set in the bardo—the liminal plane between death and the next life, in Tibetan Buddhism—the story centers on Willie Lincoln, the 11-year-old son of Abraham Lincoln. Unable to come to terms with his premature demise, Willie struggles to pass on—despite the encouragement of a band of hapless haunts he encounters along the way—while his devastated father makes repeated pilgrimages to his grave, desperate to commune with the boy’s spirit, and attempts to heal a nation at war with itself. Simultaneously mesmerizing and macabre, humorous and heartbreaking, it’s a perfect piece for Tony-nominated director Lileana Blain-Cruz, who returns to the Met following her eye-popping vision of John Adams’s El Nino in 2024. Baritone Peter Mattei stars as the grieving president, headlining a starry ensemble that features such Met luminaries as soprano Christine Goerke, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, and bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, conducted by Music Director Yannick Nezet-Seguin.

In advance of the work’s October 19 debut, the opera’s creators discussed bringing this modern-day ghost story to the Met.

Composer Missy Mazzoli, author George Saunders, and librettist Royce Vavrek in conversation

George, take us back to the beginning. What inspired you to write a novel about Abraham Lincoln mourning the death of his son?

George Saunders: I was visiting Washington, D.C., with my family, and my wife’s cousin pointed out Oak Hill Cemetery. She said, “That’s where Willie Lincoln was briefly buried. At the time, the newspapers reported that President Lincoln had been so grief-stricken that he went into the crypt on several occasions to somehow interact with the body.” I knew right then that there was a book in there, but I didn’t think I could do it. The idea kept coming back, and I didn’t want my gravestone to read “Avoided that which he most longed to do,” so finally I just launched into it.

Missy and Royce, what made you think Lincoln in the Bardo could be the source for your next opera?

Missy Mazzoli: George is one of my favorite writers. He does in words what I try to do in music. He creates a scenario that is more or less realistic and then completely turns it on its head. So when the Met commissioned me to write an opera and asked what kind of stories I would like to tell, I sort of blurted out, Lincoln in the Bardo. It just leapt into my mind, and the rest is history.

Royce Vavrek: The first time I read it, I was completely blown away. It’s one of those gorgeous stories that always dazzles. There’s an effervescence about it and a joyful quality, even though it deals with grief and losing a child.

An early technical rehearsal

George, what was your reaction when Missy and Royce approached you about adapting your novel for the stage?

GS: I was overjoyed because when I was writing the novel, I really meant it to be a big, operatic, dramatic work. When I met Missy, I could tell that she really got it. In writing a book about a dead child, one of the challenges was how to get in enough levity to keep the ship afloat. Missy was all over that musically—how to maintain that lyrical, elegiac feeling and then every so often shooting a bottle rocket across it. And when Royce sent me the libretto, I sailed through it. It’s only 40 pages and yet somehow doesn’t leave anything out. That’s how skillful it is.

Royce, what were the challenges of adapting the novel into a libretto?

RV: I think the novel is perfect, so there wasn’t much need for us to imagine things that weren’t in the text. It was more about organizing the ideas. I think I have maybe 10,000 words, where George had six or seven times as many.

MM: There are something like 117 characters in the book! So we had to make some hard decisions about whom to cut out.

RV: We decided to distill it down to Willie and Abraham Lincoln and then three main ghosts. But we kept all these really delightful secondary characters who are also super important. George had already given the characters such singular voices. So, while we had to pare down the many, many, many voices in the novel, we still tried to utilize as much of George’s singular language as we could.

Lileana Blain-Cruz: One of the things that’s really satisfying about the book is that George managed to write about this historical time while making a kind of multiverse, with many different worlds and characters coexisting simultaneously. Royce did a beautiful job of maintaining that sense of the multiplicity of characters while helping the audience really follow the central ones who Willie meets along his journey.

An early technical rehearsal

Missy, how would you characterize your musical approach in this score?

MM: George has created this magical, unrealistic space, where things can shift very quickly. Nothing is ever clearly one thing or another. Instead, every section is sort of all emotions at once, and I felt that my job as a composer was to capture that world and create that sense of mystery. So, while I used a pretty typical orchestration, there are some really fun additions. There’s a lot of strange percussion, crunchy brass chords, and different string-playing techniques, like sliding glass on the strings. There’s even a moment when the chorus plays kazoos. Hearing a kazoo in an opera is one thing, but hearing 60 professional singers singing into kazoos is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

What about the vocal writing?

MM: I was about a fifth of the way through composing the score when I remembered, “All these people are ghosts. The only living character is Abraham Lincoln.” That set me free to experiment with a lot of wild vocal techniques and take them further than I would have if the opera had a more conventional setting. For instance, Bevins, who’s this queer 17-year-old who committed suicide—he’s in this excited, anxious state all the time, so he’s constantly singing these crazy ornaments. And then there’s Elise Traynor, a 14-year-old girl we cast as a countertenor to give her a high youthful quality, but with an uncanny, otherworldly richness.

Director Lileana-Blain Cruz

Lileana, how did you and your creative team approach staging this piece?

LBC: Adam Rigg, who designed the set, and I really wanted to create a world that is both familiar and unfamiliar, that could hold the multiplicity of people’s realities. The setting is a kind of field of trees and overgrown grasses inspired by Oak Hill Cemetery, but with this magical, surreal feel. Our costume designer, Montana Levi Blanco, was really interested in the range of time over which people would have been buried and how that manifests in their physical state in the bardo. So there are these really big, flowing historical silhouettes, but with moss, mold, and decay creeping over them. It’s like this beautiful tapestry of a person’s life living on their costume.

Were you intimidated by all the supernatural elements that you would have to include in the production?

LBC: That’s been a really fun, exciting challenge. There’s a spirit who enters into another spirit. Somebody needs to disappear in midair. There’s a woman who transforms into a dozen pigs and a burning furnace. How do you do that? Fortunately, I have an extraordinary team, including a special effects designer, Jeremy Chernick. There are these vine-like tendrils that threaten to keep Willie trapped for eternity. They’re not human beings, but they’re not just creatures—they’re almost a combination of both. It took a collaboration between our puppet designer, James Ortiz, and Montana, who built these insanely detailed tendril costumes, and our choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly, who came up with these almost suspended non-human gestures, to bring them to life. It really takes everybody to create the atmosphere of this space.

What do you hope audiences will take away from Lincoln in the Bardo?

RV: I hope that over the course of this opera, the audience will get to experience the full gamut of human emotion and understand what it means to be human. And for as many tears as I think there will be, I hope that there are moments of great humor as well.

LBC: Absolutely. One might think that in a story about grief, you’re in for one long slog of an evening, but the opposite is true. This piece has a momentum and a lightness that keeps it alive. It really takes you on this ride that has wonder and strangeness and sadness and silliness. The audience is as innocent as Willie encountering all of these different experiences and learning in the process.

MM: I write music to give voice to emotions and situations for which we have no words. So much of this story meditates on death and dying, and a lot of my thinking about death has worked its way into this piece. I’m a practicing death doula, and I assist people and their families through the dying process. I feel a willingness in myself to look directly at that and to step into those situations without fear, and hopefully we can do that for the audience, too.

GS: Love and grief are two sides of the same coin. For me, this story is not so much a story about death as it is about love. Missy and Royce have created something that really wants to be understood, that invites the listener to be a part of it. There are certain moments when I think the whole room will come to attention, and everybody will be remembering the people they’ve lost. There’s a magic in that I can’t quite articulate—it’s coming right from the heart.

Interviews by Matt Dobkin
Edited by Christopher Browner