NEW YORK — The explosive ovation that greeted The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay at the Metropolitan Opera was well earned at the world premiere on Sept. 21, despite potentially insurmountable challenges posed by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel on which it’s based.
Michael Chabon’s original book, published in 2000, could easily spawn 10 operas over the course of its meticulously descriptive 684 pages. And in the opening scenes at the Met, composer Mason Bates, librettist Gene Scheer, and director Bartlett Sher seemed to aim a bit low. The World War II-era story of two cousins — a polio survivor from Brooklyn and a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague, creating anti-Hitler comic books — seemed to be shaping up into yet another American Dream parable. But soon, the opera became nothing so simple as Joseph Kavalier (the Czech cousin) and Sam Clay (the Brooklyn guy) find that their avenging Houdini-inspired superhero The Escapist opens the door to sexual awakenings (Sam is gay), mental collapse, and the creation of a more redemptive character transcending wartime chaos.
The jaw-dropping picaresque plot turns in the book are often missing. The creation of the comics is secondary to more important themes. Mainly, the opera is about love amid ruins — the most terrible ruins of the 20th century — in all its possibilities and permutations.
Not surprising in such a sprawling story, the first act doesn’t really mesh. Though there are a number of alluring elements, scenes that keep jumping between Europe and America are in need of a stronger through line. Characters initially seem like historic points of reference with an emotional life in basic, primary colors. But as confessional moments escalate into something more detailed and dramatically intense, the opera achieves a moving Act I climax with the news that Kavalier’s sister was on a torpedoed ship en route to Brooklyn.
The Kevin Puts opera The Hours came to mind, and how multiple plot lines were so easily enveloped into a central operatic membrane. That’s exactly what happened in Kavalier & Clay‘s Act II, when the opera truly found its stride and became an integrated entity, partly because the characters’ inner lives were portrayed with meaningful parallels. Also, the outer lives were successfully encompassed by the set design (credited to Jenny Melville and Mark Grimmer of 59 Studio) showing the many locales on a revolving stage that made everyone part of the same, tragic world.
Where were the “amazing adventures”? They’re more appropriate to the book. My favorite omission is Kavalier’s escape from Prague in the coffin of a dormant golem (a mythical rescue creature made of clay) that is dressed up to resemble a human corpse. But the opera is so complete by itself that it didn’t leave me wanting more. The graphics — some bordering on 3D, others with the kind of sketchiness that can be seen at an artist’s desk — were among the most sophisticated and artistically satisfying I’ve seen at the Met. Director Sher simply made this huge operatic mechanism work, more among individual scenes in Act I but capturing the story’s overall sweep in Act II.
Once Scheer got past some awkward (but necessary) plot exposition, his words made me grateful that the singers mostly had good English diction. Singers were particularly convincing in establishing their shifting relationship. As Kavalier and Clay, respectively, baritone Andrzej Filończyk and tenor Miles Mykkanen had the hard work of carrying the story with vocal lines that were more declamatory than lyrical, but they made their points. Both of their lovers — mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce and baritone Edward Nelson — had more grateful traditionally operatic moments.
Composer Bates has the necessary operatic equipment, and then some. Modern composers can be a bit obligatory in their choral writing, but Bates knows how to make ensembles speak with great dramatic purpose. Overall, his music has much rhythmic vigor, even if he occasionally falls back on John Adams-style minimalism. Much 1940s big-band music is artfully employed for scenes set in New York. The primary, and perhaps only, shortcoming is in his word settings that don’t fully translate what is normally spoken prose into sung dialogue.
However, Bates’ orchestration — often glowing, richly colored, with gorgeous use of French horns — is able to project levels of expression where the words leave off. One emotional transformation has an orchestral gesture starting quietly in the winds, expanding into the brass that fan out into a wide-reaching tone cluster, and then taking a step beyond with formidable electronic sounds.
Though Kaija Saariaho’s opera L’amour de loin uses electronics as added atmosphere (like spirits whispering in the background), Bates augments the orchestra, going to more emphatic levels of expression without forcing the orchestra to do what it’s not built for. The fact that acoustical and electronic elements were so well balanced has to be the work of conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has been game for many amazing adventures in modern music in recent years as the Met has committed to new works with the considerable resources it can muster.
Significant postscript: Before the opera started, Met chief Peter Gelb (greeted with a smattering of boos) gave a curtain speech about protecting freedom of expression — seconded by Senator Chuck Schumer, who also appeared onstage. They received one of the longest ovations of the evening plus shouts of encouragement from the audience. Welcome to ever-more-blue New York City.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay runs in repertoire through Oct. 11. For information, go here.
