The tale of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon tells us in his exuberant, cornucopian 2000 novel, “began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the night that Sammy’s mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in the bed for his cousin from Prague.” I can imagine an operatic version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay that would have that same crackle and wit, reproducing the same instant collision of childhood in Brooklyn and tragedy in Mitteleuropa.
That is not, however, Mason Bates’s opera, which opens with a swirl of mist in a stony city and a growl of Death Star brass; I was counting the seconds before a singing S.S. officer clomped onto the stage. Predictability, not a factor in the novel, forms the fiber of the new work that opened the Met season. Bates’s forte is buildup. Armed with darkly glowing chords, long-breathed crescendos that reach bursts of harmonic sunshine, pulsating synthesizers, and menacing snare drums, he can vamp and turn up the tension like nobody’s business. And then? The big number arrives, characters emote, high notes ring and ring and ring again … and the aria subsides unmemorably, without leaving the ozone tang that signals a bolt of musical lightning.
Ideally, an opera is born when a composer stumbles on an emotion that the original medium has left only partially expressed, one that will blossom into a musical idea. Verdi’s Otello isn’t Shakespeare’s Othello but a cauldron that alchemizes ugly impulses into irresistible beauty. Chabon’s novel, about two Jewish cousins who create a fantastically successful comic-book superhero named the Escapist, should make fine operatic material. The author throws out plenty of bones to tempt a composer. We get Ka-pow!-filled adventures, searing loss, envy, sexual bitterness, strutting villains, immigrant struggles, fantastic successes, golems, psychological undertones, even the mythic loneliness of the South Pole.
The librettist Gene Scheer thinned this fat, meaty book down to a fleet skeleton, organizing the characters into shifting pairs. There’s Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, of course, but also Joe and his girlfriend, Rosa; Sam and the secretly gay matinee idol Tracy; Sam and Rosa; and Joe and his sister, Sarah (a brother in the book). This rotating structure gives Bates an abundance of duets, and I especially had hopes for the odes to male companionship, like the marvel that Verdi bestowed on the prince and his buddy Rodrigo in Don Carlo. Again and again, Bates set the stage for a scene in which intimacy could surf waves of noble melody that never show up. I’d say it’s unfair to compare a contemporary composer to the form-defining prophets of another century — except that this American opera about American ambition and the crushing weight of Europe’s history so clearly aspires to old-fashioned, European-style grandeur.
I’ve always been awed by how hard it is to write a lovely tune. That exquisitely rare skill — the ability to arrange a handful of ordinary notes in a way that makes time stop and pulses quicken — unites long-anonymous troubadours, symphonists, Broadway entertainers, earnest singer-songwriters, griots, and ancient clerics. Opera’s traditions highlight the preciousness of that talent and also ruthlessly expose its lack. Many composers minimize the problem by relying on drama, propulsion, and sonic effect; Bates takes the challenge with admirable, if misplaced, confidence. The result is a score that flatters both singers and orchestra, vocal lines that nestle comfortably in each cast member’s range and push judiciously into virtuoso territory. Miles Mykkanen’s Sam gets to unsheathe his glinting high tenor, and Lauren Snouffer’s 14-year-old Sarah tosses her lithe soprano voice into airborne vaults. And every time, the audience is left wanting less.
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The Met has thrown its weight, glamour, and technical prowess behind the work. Yannick Nézet-Séguin has the orchestra sounding so powerful and polished that it lifts the work into pretty good. The enormous cast teems with talent. The mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce makes a wise, beguiling, and steel-spined Rosa — the perfect wartime woman. And if the baritone Andrzej Filończyk seems a shade too Clark Kentish for Kavalier’s fury and grief, he holds the spotlight with aplomb.
Bartlett Sher’s production combines the iconography of 1940s comic books with a mashup of classic cinema. Nazis snarl, trench-coated G-men stage a raid, lovers kiss atop the Empire State Building (as in An Affair to Remember, with a nod to King Kong), servicemen dance in homoerotic homage to On the Town (accompanied by heavily Bernstein-inflected music), all of them romping through a film-noir city. Bates’s score, too, has been to Hollywood and back, and if John Williams were ever in the house, he might credibly take a curtain call. All of which raises a question: Once the novel, movies, and comics have had their say, what’s left for opera in this pileup of genres?
Kavalier & Clay is a serious work about serious issues, including the idea that a global cultural phenomenon can spring from a highly operatic collision of history and an artist’s private trauma. That thought had me imagining a different plot, which I encourage the Met to consider for a future commission. It’s about a brave storyteller, gifted with eloquence and clarity, whose truths anger a vengeful king. He flees into exile, only to be entrapped and murdered just when he thought he was safe. On the Met’s stage, the writer — called, say, Jamal Khashoggi — would be sung by a heroic tenor, his tormentor by a demonic baritone.
But this company operates in compromised reality, where morality is more novelistic than operatic. And so the Met’s general manager, the nimbly opportunistic Peter Gelb, recently struck a $100 million deal with Saudi Arabia to supply Riyadh’s new opera house with three weeks’ worth of performances each year and a dose of possibly obsolete cachet.
The agreement goes a long way toward rescuing the Met’s tottering finances — since the pandemic, it’s siphoned off $120 million of its endowment for operating costs — and Gelb has argued that the company is merely following the lead of the many democratic governments that have enmeshed itself in Saudi affairs. Fair enough. But governments routinely have to make grisly tradeoffs for the good of their people. Perhaps political reality dictates that one dismembered journalist is a reasonable price to pay for access to vast reserves of oil and cash.
The Met deal is different: It suggests that since neither this city nor this country will adequately support an artistic establishment it once cultivated with pride, the company’s welfare outweighs any ethical qualms. If that’s so, Gelb might want to tone down the Met’s full-throated support of beleaguered Ukraine, invite pro-Putin musicians like Anna Netrebko back to its stage, and revise the endings of a handful of works in which the protagonists die for their principles. He might even consider adopting Falstaff’s ironic disquisition as the Met’s official anthem. What is honor? A word.
