Opera thrives on simplicity. It is an art form designed for elastic time, where actions and emotions are skillfully compressed or stretched to elevate drama into a dreamlike state.
Consequently, operatic plots tend to be direct, allowing ample space for the music to introduce complexity and profound emotion. Even Wagner’s monumental four-part ‘Ring’ cycle, spanning over 15 hours, can be summarized in mere minutes.
However, Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’, is anything but simple. Its more than 600 pages are dense with World War II-era narratives and grand themes exploring Americanness, Jewish identity, love, loss, and above all, the transformative power of pop culture. This is the very essence of fiction striving for literary excellence.
So, does such a complex narrative lend itself to an opera? Composer Mason Bates certainly believes so.
His adaptation, created with librettist Gene Scheer, premiered as the Metropolitan Opera’s season opener on Sunday. The evening began with statements from Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, and New York Senator Chuck Schumer, both speaking in defense of artistic expression and free speech. Gelb asserted that the Met “proudly stands for freedom of artistic expression,” while Schumer noted that “freedom of artistic expression and even freedom of speech is under attack — you saw what they did to Jimmy Kimmel?” (Their remarks were met with a mix of boos and applause, with one audience member urging Schumer to “do something about it.”)
From this perspective, ‘Kavalier & Clay’ could be interpreted as a powerful statement about art confronting oppression. Yet, this might overburden the opera beyond its capacity. Bates’s adaptation feels like a stone skipping across Chabon’s novel, never truly immersing itself in the depth of the source material. The result is an operatic experience that is simultaneously too sprawling and too shallow: too much plot, and not enough of the emotional transcendence one expects from the genre.
Scheer is no stranger to adapting hefty literary works; he previously tackled Theodore Dreiser’s ‘An American Tragedy’ and Herman Melville’s intricate ‘Moby-Dick’, both of which have graced the Met stage. He possesses the skill to construct a narrative, but what often diminishes in his translations is a profound sense of the underlying meaning or purpose behind the storytelling.
In ‘Kavalier & Clay’, Scheer broadly outlines the journeys of the title characters: Joe Kavalier’s escape to the United States from Nazi-occupied Prague and the horrors of the Holocaust; his collaboration with cousin Sam Clay to create the comic book hero, the Escapist; and their individual romances – Joe’s with the ambitious artist Rosa Saks, complicated by his deep-seated trauma, and Sam’s with actor Tracy Bacon, hindered by internal struggles with gay shame.
All of this is compressed into a two-and-a-half-hour runtime, leading Scheer to frequently rely on clichés. Sam’s yearning is expressed with the uninspired line: “I have a secret / I don’t want what other guys want.” A one-dimensional villain named Gerhard embodies the entirety of Nazism, delivering an Iago-like “Credo” aria to articulate his worldview. He dismisses art’s capacity for change, proclaiming that “bullets are all that matter.” A sentiment Joseph Goebbels likely wouldn’t have shared.
Much like a novelist, Scheer swiftly moves between locations in Prague, New York, and the Western Front, at times presenting them concurrently. Bartlett Sher, a veteran Broadway director renowned for his seamless elegance, skillfully orchestrates everything into a fluid, visually coherent production. This blend of realism and sliding panels features stylized animations projected by 59 Studios.
The production isn’t without its visual missteps; the Clay family’s Brooklyn home bears a stronger resemblance to a Lower East Side tenement, and many European scenes evoke the Holocaust through simplistic concentration camp imagery, including striped prisoner uniforms. However, the projections truly shine in captivating cinematic moments, demonstrating how a simple pencil sketch can unlock an entirely new world. Sher’s scenic transitions, even from a lightning-struck Empire State Building to a bustling art gallery party, unfold with the ease of flipping a comic book page.
Among the performers Sher directs are seasoned Met artists, alongside some newcomers, notably baritone Andrzej Filonczyk as Joe. Filonczyk brings an earnest, youthful vocal quality but spends much of the opera portraying a rather enigmatic character. His dialogue conveys his emotions, but the uninspired vocal writing often leaves the audience simply taking his word for it.
More vibrant is tenor Miles Mykkanen’s portrayal of Sam, a dynamic role he embraces with radiant excitement and compelling expressiveness. Equally commanding is mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce as Rosa, exuding the charm and presence of a Mrs. Maisel. Some of the opera’s most poignant moments occur when Sam and Rosa connect, both feeling left behind by the men they love, forging a new, modern life together.
The large cast also features soprano Lauren Snouffer as Joe’s younger sister, Sarah (a gender change from the novel), who, like Joe, is given limited scope to create a lasting impression. The same could be said for bass-baritone Craig Colclough as Gerhard, the Nazi antagonist. Baritone Edward Nelson, as Tracy, offers a delightful warmth and evident ease in a role demanding an actor’s confidence and readiness to dance—a feat few opera singers can manage without awkwardness.
Bates seems to have the most musical fun in scenes involving Sam and Tracy, such as their dance, infusing them with a big-band sound and, in one instance, a chattering chorus that playfully alludes to a character named Dick Johnson. Their first kiss, shared atop the Empire State Building, is grandly cinematic.
Much of this opera, conducted with zest by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, shares a similar cinematic quality. Bates has built his reputation on fusing symphonic and electronic music, creating a facade of coolness that ultimately reveals a rather amiable innocuousness. His score is almost always overtly illustrative, guiding the listener’s thoughts and emotions like a movie soundtrack, rather than enriching them with layers of dramatic subtlety.
The opening scene, set in 1939 Prague, begins with an ominous low note and martial percussion. A bustling office is underscored by typewriters, and the name Superman is sung with a long, soaring melody. Salvador Dalí makes a brief appearance at the art gallery with precisely the puckish, comedic tone one would anticipate, and the opera concludes harmoniously with a chord that could have scored any Hollywood Golden Age film.
At its most exhilarating, yet also most uninspired, Bates’s score portrays the Escapist with soaring strings and brassy, blockbuster heroism, heavily drawing from Danny Elfman’s soundtracks for Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ and Sam Raimi’s ‘Spider-Man’ movies. Perhaps it’s fitting that this music is entirely symphonic, designed to accompany video rather than singers.
Bates’s music can be skillful, even enjoyable. But it is also often forgettable, mirroring a trend seen in much contemporary opera at the Met since its post-pandemic reopening. There have been notable exceptions, such as Brett Dean’s ‘Hamlet’ and Kaija Saariaho’s devastating masterpiece ‘Innocence’, which is slated for its Met premiere later this season.
The prevailing house style, however, frequently aims for topical relevance, evident in explorations of race and sexuality in ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’, drone warfare in ‘Grounded’, and the antifascist power of art in ‘Kavalier & Clay’. While admirable in its intent, this approach often results in toothless scores that demand so little from their audiences, they would easily fade into background entertainment in any other context.
This is not the true essence of opera. Its elevated form of life and storytelling should command your full attention, possessing the power to utterly consume you. But that power manifests only when opera is at its absolute best.