3 weeks ago
23
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
The Metropolitan Opera opened its season with a superficial adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.”
Sept. 22, 2025Updated 3:14 p.m. ET
Opera benefits from simplicity. It is an art form of elastic time, of actions and emotions compressed and stretched to elevate drama to something more like a dream.
Because of that, plots tend to be straightforward, making room for the music to add complication and transcendence. Wagner’s four-part, epic “Ring” may run more than 15 hours, but it could be summarized in just a few minutes.
Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” is not simple. Its more than 600 pages teem with World War II-era action and lofty themes about Americanness, Jewishness, love, death and, above all, pop culture’s ability to change lives. This is the stuff of fiction that aspires to literary greatness.
Does it also have the makings of an opera? The composer Mason Bates thinks so.
His adaptation, with the librettist Gene Scheer, opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Sunday. It was an evening that started with statements from Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, in defense of artistic expression and free speech. Gelb said that the Met was “proudly standing for freedom of artistic expression,” and Schumer said that “freedom of artistic expression and even freedom of speech is under attack — you saw what they did to Jimmy Kimmel?” (They were met with a mix of boos and applause; one audience member yelled at Schumer to “do something about it.”)
“Kavalier & Clay,” seen in that light, could be a testament to the power of art against oppression. But that may be placing more weight on the opera than it can support. Like a skipping stone, Bates’s adaptation bounces across Chabon’s novel while never really plunging into it, for a treatment that is both too much for opera and not enough: too much plot, not enough transcendence.
Image
