PERSPECTIVE – Missy Mazzoli’s opera Lincoln in the Bardo, with libretto by Royce Vavrek, will have its world premiere run at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in October. Mazzoli is one of only two women to be commissioned by the Met (the other is Jeanne Tesori). In this edition of Gail Wein’s podcast Classical Gas, Mazzoli tells Wein that the novel by George Saunders “felt like a weighty work that was about America at a very divided moment.”:
In Lincoln in the Bardo, the characters of the story are all ghosts, except for Abraham Lincoln. “That really set my imagination free in terms of what could happen on the stage,” Mazzoli says. The composer also describes the process of assembling the cast, which includes Christine Goerke, Anthony Roth Costanzo, and Stephanie Blythe. The new opera is based on a novel by George Saunders, and the world premiere production is by Lileana Blain-Cruz.
Quick summary of the opera: The action takes place over the course of a single night in February 1862 at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C., during the first year of the Civil War. Eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln, the beloved son of President Abraham Lincoln, has died of typhoid fever and been laid to rest in a crypt. A grieving President Lincoln returns to the cemetery alone at night to open the casket and hold his son’s body. In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo is a transitional state between death and rebirth. As depicted in the opera, the cemetery is populated by dozens of confused, restless ghosts who refuse to accept that they are dead, referring to their caskets as “sick boxes.” Willie Lincoln died on Feb. 20, 1862, more than three years before Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865.
Metropolitan Opera music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts performances Oct. 19–Nov. 14.
Also in this episode of Classical Gas, Mazzoli talks with Wein about another major achievement: In 2016, Mazzoli and composer Ellen Reid founded Luna Composition Lab, an intensive program for female and non-binary composers age 13-18. Each year, six of these young women are paired with a mentor who is a prominent female composer, giving them an immersion in professional musical life in New York.
For its 10th anniversary, Luna Lab commissioned dozens of its alumni to write one or two new works — nearly 100 in all. Each new work will receive its premiere this season somewhere in the U.S.
