Opera in the Bardo

 

Everett Sobers at bottom left as Willie Lincoln, the president's dead 11-year-old son, and formerly enslaved characters, also dead, played by Joshua Blue, Janai Brugger, and Viviana Goodwin in Missy Mazzoli's and Royce Vavrek's Lincoln in the Bardo at the Metropolitan. Photo by Karen Almond/Met Opera taken from Stephanie Boyd's review for I Care If You Listen.

Here's a chance to recommend an opera that everybody can definitely see: Lincoln in the Bardo, based on the novel by George Saunders, music by Missy Mazzoli and libretto by Royce Vavrek, in a livestream performance watchable for free on the Met Opera YouTube Channel, with specially produced intermission features and live chat, on Saturday, November 14, starting at 8 PM ET, and available as a replay until midnight ET on Wednesday.

I saw it in the opera house last week, Election Night to be precise (I hadn't realized when I got the tickets, but it was a great way to spend a few hours not watching MS-NOW and biting my fingernails). It's a terrific show, and I was regretting that it wasn't going to be shown on video so I could see some close-ups, and now it is.

The basis is in a historical fact: Lincoln's son Willie died of typhoid fever early in 1862, and Lincoln was torn to pieces with grief and probably guilt (the White House had been holding a jolly state dinner the night the boy took his turn for the worse). He did something very unusual a number of times: let himself into the burial vault in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, late at night, to be with him, sometimes for hours, and at least once opening the coffin and pulling Willie's embalmed corpse out to hold in his arms.

Saunders's novel is not set in the objective physical world in which these things happened, though he does offer many chapters of quotations from contemporary accounts of it, but in a parallel place, the bardo or liminal space between life in the waking world and whatever comes with rebirth (the word comes from Tibetan Buddhism), at which the real Willie, the spiritual one, has just arrived. This is a densely populated community of souls that have failed for one reason or another to move on—they think of themselves in a confused way as sick, and refer to their tombs as "sick-boxes", and often nourish a hope of going back, but understand that it's normal for souls to go somewhere else at some point, in a flash of what they call "matterlightblooming"; they're really resisting that for themselves for themselves, I guess out of some unresolved trauma, which they tell us about—the book is entirely told out of their voices, each bit labeled with the character's name.

They perceive the physical world and to some extent its inhabitants, but don't and basically can't interact with them. On the other hand they have a lively and often very funny social life of their own, and a compelling story focusing on the friendship of three men, a printer called Vollman killed in an industrial accident the afternoon before he was meant to make love for the first time with his young wife (it was an arranged match, and he'd held back in hopes she'd fell in love with his generosity and kindness, as she ultimately did), and therefore has an enormous erection in his visual presentation; a young gay man, Nevins, who slit his wrists after his first lover betrayed him and whose soul-form has sprouted an enormous number of eyes, ears, noses, and hands; and a preacher, Reverend Thomas, who secretly understands that he is dead, as we eventually learn, and regards himself as superior to the others in that knowledge, but also has reason to believe he is damned, in spite of his long life of duty to his calling.

The three take an affectionate interest in Willie and encourage him to move on quickly, as the "young ones" are always supposed to do. But the intrusion of Abraham Lincoln, with his terrible grief, creates an obstacle; Willie, irritated by his father's preoccupation with "that worm" in the coffin, tries to get his attention and succeeds not in that but in "entering" his consciousness, from which he absorbs the message that he should wait, at least for Lincoln's return, while tendrils—I guess spiritual tendrils—begin growing around him to imprison him where he is. The friends decide they will have to "enter" Lincoln themselves to persuade him to let the boy go. Which is not exactly what happens, but Willie is indeed freed, the Reverend is redeemed by a heroic sacrifice, and Vollman and Nevins undergo their matterlightblooming.

"I'm dead!" sings Willie joyously. "We're all dead!" He's ready.

And practically everybody in the bardo enters Lincoln for a while, sharing their consciousnesses with him, with an outcome that seems completely unrelated: because these include the souls of brutalized and tormented slaves, and killed Union soldiers (the war wasn't going well for the Union in February 1862)—I don't think it's explicit in the book or the opera, but I felt it in both, that there was an entirely different arc to the story, that of Lincoln himself becoming aware of his dharma of pursuing the war even in its terrible cruelty and demanding emancipation, even in its fearful newness. At the very end, one ghost of enslavement, Thomas Havens, decides to help him by inhabiting him for a longer time.

And the opera? The libretto is radically simplified, of course. The 200-odd characters of the novel have been reduced to a couple of dozen, the special effects (Vollman's erection, a five-foot phallus puppet, and Nevins's multiple eyes on stalks also wielded by puppeteers) make their points and go away before they become a distraction. Properly shaped arias and melodramas squeeze each character into a whole, and the whole sticks together, improbable as that may seem (I told my neighbor when we got into conversation, "There's too much content in this thing!" but it really wasn't too much, just way more than I'm used to). Staging by Lileana Blain-Cruz in a set by Adam Rigg is consistently inventive and wild.

The music is hard to describe. It's pretty tonal, or at least pretty consonant, but still sounds adventurous, especially in the orchestration, which is all over the place; in a way it's more a soundtrack, but why not? Sounds kind of like Jánaček when it's being serious, with a lot of massed chords, and half-step alternations as between C major and C# major. And when it's being funny, it's funny, with nature sounds and electronics and kazoos too. The vocal lines aren't exactly what the old folks call tuneful (I'm waiting for American composers to come up with something like the Straussian parlando style for dialogue and letting the lyricism soar at moments of introspection), but they give the singers plenty to work with by way of emotional expression. You might not think there'd be much occasion for that in a show where the characters are mostly dead already, but the thing about the bardo is that they aren't, quite; they need to go through some things, as we say.

Can I mention some singers who did some remarkable work? Stephanie Blythe, whom I've seen as Wotan's unforgiving wife Fricka, as Mistress Quickly in Falstaff, and another tavernkeeper running a gay bar in Terence Blanchard's Champion, an incredible range. as Saunders's hard-drinking Mrs. Baron. Christine Goerke, a splendid Brünnhilde in the same Ring as Blythe if I remember right, working in male drag as Reverend Thomas alongside Ryan McKinny and Jonah Hoskins as Vollman and Nevins. Also in a drag tour de force countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo as 14-year-old Elise Traynor, who regrets that she was too young to have been married. As Lincoln, the Swedish baritone Peter Mattei, whom I've admired here as Don Giovanni, Joshua Blue as Havens, and the extraordinary kid.

But I really need to hear it again. And you need to hear it for the first time!