NEW YORK — “I am not sick. Not waiting to be revived. I am dead!”
So proclaimed Christine Goerke — with an amplitude only possible from a seasoned Wagnerian soprano — in one of the darker laugh moments of Lincoln in the Bardo, an opera in which the usual endgame (death) is an aspiration, a mission, a goal. The setting is an imaginary netherworld between life and the hereafter whose denizens need to be told that they no longer have a pulse.
The new Missy Mazzoli/Royce Vavrek opera that received its world premiere Oct. 19 at the Metropolitan Opera is a ghost story, a grimier version of Alice in an anti-Wonderland and a deep, genuine study in grief, as Abraham Lincoln visits the interment site of his deceased son Willie amid other spirits seeking to resolve their own losses. It’s a true grand opera, visually towering and full of special effects (Lileana Blain-Cruz, director), a Straussian orchestral presence (Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting), hero-sized characters, and ghostly choruses that are anything but demure.
The Met’s first commission by a female composer, the opera is a clear-cut audience hit on the level of last season’s production of Mason Bates’ The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier & Clay. More probing listeners might find that, however brilliant the adaptation of the surreal 2017 George Saunders novel (whose 166 characters are boiled down to 23), the first-act pacing is all over the place, and the all-star cast members for the current run (through Nov. 14) are still growing into their roles. But the opera has greatness — how much remains to be seen in this dense, sophisticated, eccentric theater piece that shows composer and librettist easily surpassing their previous achievements (Breaking the Waves, The Listeners, etc).
Opera has never been an outpost of logic, which is why this freewheeling, macabre, but still reverent treatment of Lincoln is so well suited to opera. The characters in this oddball limbo — called “the bardo” — tell their life stories in a cross section of what would seem like Americana if Mazzoli and Vavrek hadn’t made a point to drill down to a universal essence. Also, these spirits are engagingly less filtered in their undead states, not just detailing their resentments but acting out their fantasies.
The momentousness of death is somewhat underplayed, the opera being set in the 19th century, when families were large because not everyone was expected to reach adulthood. The story also follows current ghost theories, namely that these confused, lost souls died prematurely, quickly, or unexpectedly, and are thus stranded in the bardo, with its weedy mausoleum existing in eternal twilight. Lincoln’s son Willie (1850–1862) for one, died at age 11, when a cold developed into typhoid fever.
From a narrative standpoint, the first act maybe captures the stasis of the bardo all too well, partly because any opera houses as large as the Met encourage vocal projection over diction. But even when the specifics of a character’s dilemma became a bit hazy, the dramatically precise music was not. As the one living character, Lincoln is the main source of operatic pathos, existing in an island of temporal reality as he visits his son’s corpse. His monologues anchor the score in much-needed ways, but not because they’re more traditional.
Mazzoli doesn’t package emotions with a beginning, middle, and end. She lets them run off their leash. Truly a content-dictates-form composer, she gives the words and inner lives of the characters good-sense vocal lines that go for meaning, not vocal showcasing.
The exception to this anti-showcase approach is the always-superb Peter Mattei as Lincoln, with his great vocal and theatrical depth. I loved the novelty of seeing major vocal stars gender-switching — Goerke as Reverend and Anthony Roth Costanzo as a 14-year-old girl with a white dress whose train stretched halfway across the Met stage. I’m always up for Ryan McKinny (Vollman) and especially Stephanie Blythe (Mrs. Baron) in anything. Janai Brugger had some good, sassy moments as Mrs. Francis Hodge. As Willie, Everett Sobers, 12, couldn’t have been more charming, though any child performer in such a key part warrants discreet amplification.
With all respect to the singers, the star of the show was the orchestra under Nézet-Séguin. Having written five operas (including this one), Mazzoli’s most obvious area of growth is in her orchestration, which is hugely colorful, varied, and tells listeners about aspects of the characters that are beyond words. The detail and economy of her scoring rivals that of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos.
Also employing economy of means (in a maximal way) is the Adam Rigg set design that accommodates special effects I won’t spoil for those who have yet to see the show, though pyrotechnics (employed when characters escape the bardo) seemed too Disney-esque for this serious enterprise. Mostly, stage pictures are handsome but not self-consciously picturesque. There is a larger attempt to envelop the 3,800-seat auditorium into the opera’s alternative reality: Lights are dim upon entry and chandeliers blink manically, as lights supposedly do when ghosts are present.
In many ways, the success of Lincoln in the Bardo luckily mirrors John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), a similar otherworldly opera, the first new piece the Met had done in years with a starry cast and a collage-like narrative that was more readily understood by critics granted advance access to librettos and the dress rehearsal.
Though Bardo librettos exist, they weren’t available at the Met gift shop. Its music isn’t easy to parse the first time around. And even the best new operas need extra boost. For the San Francisco Opera world premiere of Doctor Atomic in 2005, John Adams created a midi reduction of the entire score for critics to preview. I’m sure to revisit Lincoln in the Bardo. But most journalists have only one shot at writing a comprehending review.
