A Song of Grief and Union in "Lincoln in the Bardo"

Missy Mazzoli’s “Lincoln in the Bardo” Opens at the Metropolitan Opera

The sixth opera by American composer Missy Mazzoli made its premiere last month at the Metropolitan Opera, marking the company’s first premiere by a woman. Written with longtime librettist Royce Vavrek and based on the novel by George Saunders, “Lincoln in the Bardo” follows Abraham Lincoln as he visits his deceased eleven-year-old son, Willie, in a Civil War-era cemetery filled with restless ghosts.

The production translates Saunders’s purgatorial concept—drawing on the Tibetan term “bardo”—into a theatrical comedy with a melancholy guise. The graveyard’s residents remain trapped in obsessive loops, mistaking their coffins for “sick-boxes” and refusing to accept that they are dead. Among them are Vollman, a printer killed by a falling beam just before consummating his marriage, and Bevins, a young man who died by suicide after being jilted by a lover. Sung respectively by baritone Ryan McKinny and tenor Jonah Hoskins, the characters weave their grievances into an operatic duet of unrequited love and sudden loss.

Staging the Afterlife with Historic and Gender-Swapped Roles

The production features prominent turns from dramatic soprano Christine Goerke as a deceased clergyman known as the Reverend, and countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo as a fourteen-year-old named Miss Elise Traynor. Goerke anchors the second act with a soaring, droll bravura aria, while Costanzo’s character wears an enormous, mildewing white dress trimmed with rubber pig heads, serving as a cautionary tale for those who linger too long in the Bardo.

A Song of Grief and Union in "Lincoln in the Bardo" | The New Yorker

The central dramatic weight rests on Abraham Lincoln’s grief. Having overseen thousands of wartime casualties, Lincoln visits the crypt and embraces his son’s corpse. Swedish baritone Peter Mattei sings the role of the President. Director Lileana Blain-Cruz utilizes a glowing, throbbing shirtfront on the actor to signal Saunders’s concept of “occupation,” where ghosts enter the living to project their thoughts.