Mason Bates' Met-bound opera 'Kavalier & Clay' based on Michael Chabon novel premieres in Indiana

When composer Mason Bates approached Michael Chabon about turning his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" into an opera, he said the writer told him frankly that "opera was not his thing."

"He was very supportive of the endeavor and he gave it his blessing, but he said he couldn't be involved," Bates recalled. "He was really more giving it a thumbs-up on a rights level."

So Bates and librettist Gene Scheer proceeded on their own to wrangle into operatic form Chabon's sprawling, Pulitzer Prize-winning tale about two young Jewish cousins set over more than a decade before and after World War II.

Now, six years after Bates first read the novel and became inspired by it, the opera is bound for the Metropolitan Opera, due to open the company's next season in September 2025.

But first it's having its world premiere on Friday in what might seem an unlikely spot, at the Jacobs School of Music on the University of Indiana campus in Bloomington. The premiere was originally planned for the Los Angeles Opera, but the company begged off, citing the costs involved.

Bloomington turns out to be not such a surprising choice given that the school has nearly 300 voice students and the Musical Arts Center, built in 1972, was modeled after the Met stage.

"The space and technology and those kinds of production elements were very attractive to the Met in terms of how the opera would play here," said Catherine Compton, managing director of the school's opera and ballet theater program.

"It's been heartening to see how our students have reacted and been elevated by the Met's creative team that's been in residence here," she said. "And also how the creative team has been able to adapt their process to our students."

In fact, Met staff will be back in Bloomington in January to workshop another forthcoming commission, an opera by Carlos Simon called "In the Rush" with a libretto by playwright Lynn Nottage and her daughter, Ruby Aiyo Gerber.

"Kavalier & Clay" was commissioned by the Met after Peter Gelb, the company's general manager, attended a performance of Bates' first opera, "The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs," in 2017 in Santa Fe, New Mexico .

Paul Cremo, the Met's dramaturg, connected Bates with Scheer, a veteran librettist widely praised for his work in turning Herman Melville's unwieldy masterpiece "Moby Dick" into the text for an opera composed by Jake Heggie. The Met will perform that opera next March.

"I give 'Moby Dick' to new librettists for a model of how to get to the essence," Cremo said. "'Kavalier & Clay' goes down a lot of side roads into history and nooks and crannies. I figured we needed somebody who gets how to adapt and condense a book into an opera."

With many of the "nooks and crannies" — like a 40-page detour to Antarctica — stripped away, Scheer was able to focus on the two main characters.

There's Joe Kavalier, who escapes to America from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Holocaust, dreams of bringing his younger brother to safety in America, and falls in love with Rosa, a Bohemian artist. His cousin is the Brooklyn-born Sammy Clay, who dreams of striking it rich and, ambivalent about his sexuality, has a thwarted love affair with a handsome actor.

Together, using Sammy's talent for story-telling and Joe's artistic genius, the cousins invent a wildly popular comic strip character called The Escapist.

Scheer and Bates identified three distinct worlds depicted in the novel, each of which lent itself to a different compositional style.

"There's the world of World War II, where we see the Kavalier family picked off one by one," Bates said. "It's a very dark musical space with a lot of drums and mandolins. Then the big band music of 1940s New York, a lot of swing, a lot of jazz. Then when they start to draw and they create art, we go into this electro-acoustic, techno-symphonic space."

Bates said he deliberately keeps these sound worlds separate at first, but "what becomes really exciting in the opera is that as Joe goes through kinds of a psychedelic spiral, these worlds start to collide and smash together."

Keeping these worlds visually separate and then merging them posed both a challenge and an opportunity for director Bart Sher, who worked on the set design with 59 Productions, a company known for its innovative use of projections and animation.

"The unique challenge to 'Kavalier & Clay' is the simultaneity of space and time," Sher said. "You might see them working in the office of Empire Toys and at the same time see their family struggling in Prague, and at the same time see them try to capture what the experience is like through The Escapist.

"And if you can get all three of those elements to work at the same time and have music and song — then you really have something in this piece that I think is very special."