The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
We first started hearing about this opera back in the spring of this year when it was announced for the MET’s opening program for the season.
While I was unfamiliar with the source material (Michael Chabon’s 2001 novel with the same name as the opera), I found it and read it quickly, despite its 600+ pages.
I wrote about the book, with my impressions, in my last post, and I had a fine time with it. And as noted in the previous post, once I got into the book I was soon ready for the opera. [Click on the second title at the right to see that post.]
And by mid-summer, the excellent public information and promotional teams at the opera house were doing super work. By September we and most of our New York opera friends had made our plans for hearing the opera.
Then in early September, with Opening Night and the beginning of the season just two weeks away, some of us were invited to come to the Peter B. Lewis Theater at the Guggenheim Museum to learn about what was coming up. The program’s participants provided real insight (and enthusiasm) for the opera, and it seemed like everyone taking part in the project was there to share their thoughts and ideas with us:
- Peter Gelb, the Met’s General Manager
- Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Music Director
- Mason Bates, Composer
- Gene Scheer, Librettist
- Bartlett Sher, Director
- Sun-Ly Pierce, Mezzo-Soprano
- Miles Mykkanen, Tenor
- Andrezej Filończyk, Baritone
- Katelan Trãn Terrell, Piano
Needless to say, after we left this informative and delightfully anticipatory meeting, we waited for September 21, Opening Night. Once the performances began, no one I knew was disappointed. There was much news coverage, including an informative piece about the Composer Mason Bates in The New York Times on September 11, with Adam Nagourney writing about meeting Bates at the composer’s home in California.
Nagourney’s article — “The Composer Bringing ‘Symphonic Electronica’ to the Met” — describes how Bates with this opera “expands the sound world of the Metropolitan Opera.” Indeed, when Bates during Nagourney’s visit shared some sound which Nagourney described as a “sequential and trembling blast” filled the room. Bates had a simple response: “We are making the superhero world,” he said. “I felt like we needed some electronica.”
And what did he mean when he spoke about that “superhero” world? That we learn from the opera’s plot, which is condensed from the huge novel. Despite the book’s vast popularity and excellence of treatment, the plot was edited to fit the requirement of a three-hour opera.
For me, the best plot description came in the opera’s written program, handed out to audience members and, as it happened, written by Bates himself:
The three worlds of this sprawling epic make for storytelling on a grand scale. We open in the darkness of Prague amidst the Nazi occupation, then move to exuberant New York in the swinging 1940s, and soon enter the technicolor world of comic-book art. But underneath these glistening surfaces is a soulful story of two cousins desperately trying to make enough money to get their family out of war-torn Europe. In the process, they each fall in love and endure extraordinary tragedy. Passion, desperation, art, and war all swirling around a love quartet: That’s the stuff of opera.
Yet another quotation — this one from Jay Goodwin in “Master Key,” his introductory essay in the opera house program — refers to that “three worlds” storytelling framework, which Goodwin refers to as a “key structural decision” made by Librettist Gene Scheer. And Goodwin, too, turns to composer Bates, noting that “It was then up to Bates to bring those disparate environments to life with his music.
Goodwin writes:
The job was tailor-made for the eclectic and inventive composer, who is Juilliard-trained and steeped in the classical musical tradition but also deeply enmeshed in the world of electronica, often performing as a DJ. He’s also done serious work as a film composer. In his words, it’s all about “integrating classical music into the 21st century in new and surprising ways, while also being true to its long and ancient history.”
Goodwin continues and describes one of the most important characteristics he attributes to Bates:
Bates has brought that ethos and all of his varied experience to bear on Kavalier and Clay, his second opera after the Grammy-winning The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs from 2017. In the Prague scenes, for example, “there’s a dark atmosphere as you’re watching the family being pursued by the SS, with mandolin, plectrum, lots of pizzicato, and inflections of Bartók and Janáček,” he says, “but you’ll also hear these very ominous synthesizer drones.” Bates, not Jewish himself, wanted to bring an authenticity to the subject matter, so he spent six months attending services at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, immersing himself in the culture and thinking of ways to integrate elements of what he heard into his music. “I found this incredible tune, ‘Ani Ma’amin,’ which was allegedly written in a boxcar on the way to Treblinka,” he says. A profession of faith with a downtrodden but determined melody, it became part of the score.
Was there more? I think so, and I feel obliged to refer to other immediate impressions that stayed with me, long after I left the opera house after the performance of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
My big reaction has to do with the place of opera in troubled times, a point made by many people at the MET, including both administrative and creative (and performance) participants. It was a point in particular made by Mason Bates in the quotation above, when he speaks about “integrating classical music into the 21st century in new and surprising ways, while also being true to its long and ancient history.” Do we not, as listeners especially but also as performers and managers, have an obligation to “raise” ourselves regardless of ugly happenings in the world surrounding us? Isn’t that what many operas have done? Certainly they’ve provided the music and listening experience that comes with musical events, but can those operas not also bring hope and love for humanity into our society, just as they do when we hear an opera like this one?
My response to that is a resounding “Yes”!
And that reaction leads us to another, expressed—in different ways—by two dear friends both now very intimate with this opera. One predicts that this opera will become a solid part of the opera canon or, more simply, the accepted list of works now referred to as “opera.” The other friend’s thoughts link closely to the first, seeing this opera as—in his opinion—the best of modern opera, to be thought of with respect and importance as we think of such operas as, for example, Philip Glass’s great masterpiece Akhnaten.
Then there was my own emotional reaction to what I heard and saw, and that’s been a surprise to me as I’ve thought about this opera. Everyone who knows me knows how I love going to the opera, a big activity for me for most of my adult life. Nevertheless (perhaps from an early exposure to the role of music in one’s life), I’ve often only thought about any individual opera as an educational or learning experience with the music creating an emotional experience.
Not with this opera. I was totally attentive to what’s happening on stage and, at the some time, I could feel myself getting — as we say — “all choked up” as the opera’s end approached. And when we saw Clay move across the stage away from Joe and Rosa and their child, pick up his suitcase and walk off upstage as the title of the opera — in lovely (mechanized) handwriting — was written on the black screen at the back of the stage, the tears almost got to me. Yes, we had learned, and relished in what we had learned, that with love, hope, and (I would perhaps add some optimism in there somewhere), we can achieve in our lives what we want to achieve.
Was there more? I think so, and I feel obliged to refer to other immediate impressions that stayed with me, even long after I left the opera house after being in the audience for a performance.
Obviously too much, for this one writer, but I’ll mention one last, brief memory: the simplicity and elegance of how the many electronic/technical scene changes take place during the performance (I think someone told me, or I read somewhere, that the number is 57). Think of the few we usually see in most opera or theatrical performances.
And in the performance my friends and I attended, we were impressed with the subtlety and swiftness of what happened before our eyes (especially the elegant and deft white “frames” when this or that element of a set had to be emphasized).
What’s next? Who knows? But if we think about what else is coming us at the MET for the next several months, we’ll have many, many fine programs, those we’ve loved in the past, new productions, and a very full season to take us to mid-June.
And, yes, if we want more of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the success of the performances in September and October has led to four more performances being scheduled, these to come in the company’s usually quiet month of February. The dates are February 17, 18, 20, and 21.
To learn more, go to metopera.org and click “Tickets” in the MENU on the upper left. That will take you to the full list of operas offered. Click on the first (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay). There you’ll find the list of performances, the opera’s synopsis, the pages from the program, performers and staff, and if you continue scrolling down to the bottom of the screen, you see about 12 short videos relating to the opera.
FLASH: In response to a query about cinema presentations of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, this just received: Most theaters will present this opera on January 24 ’26. As you find your theater at https://www.metopera.org/season/in-cinemas/ (as you click on Find your Theater button), you will find which date they present the transmission.
Have fun.