With Lincoln in the Bardo by Missy Mazzoli, the Met first entrusts an absolute first to a composer. But the real revolution of the work is not statistical: it is to give voice to what remains suspended between loss, memory and love.
by Marialuisa Veneziano
20 October 2026
The Metropolitan Opera House in New York has known everything.
Kings freaking out. Women who die of love. Men who sell the soul. Gods, demons, revolutions, murderers, redemptions, betrayals. He gave voice to centuries of human passions, often with that generosity that only the work possesses: when we no longer know what to say, someone begins to sing.
Yet, in a hundred and forty-three years of history, one thing had not yet happened.
A woman had never seen her own birth work in the first absolute on that stage.
On 19 October 2026 that silence interrupted.
Missy Mazzoli signs Lincoln in the Bardo, on a libretto by Royce Vavrek, from George Saunders' novel. Yannick Nézet-Séguin directs, Lileana Blain-Cruz takes care of the direction, Peter Mattei plays Abraham Lincoln. Around him, a constellation of living only in appearance: Christine Goerke, Stephanie Blythe, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Ryan McKinny, Janai Brugger and others still populate a place that is neither this world nor the other.
The historical data is huge.
But it would be almost a shame to stop there.
Why Lincoln in the Bardo not only asks the Metropolitan to fill a gap in its history.
He's asking for something harder.
Asks a theater used to house the dead of Listen to them.
A father enters a cemetery
The starting point is simple and unbearable.
In 1862 Willie Lincoln, 11-year-old son of Abraham Lincoln, died. The novel by George Saunders imagines the child held in an intermediate area, the barn: term from Tibetan Buddhist tradition and used here as a space between a finite life and what will come next.
Willie's not alone.
Around him there is a crowd of souls unable, for different reasons, to fully recognize their own death.
But the world of the dead comes alive.
His father.
Lincoln visits his son's grave.
The man who bears a nation torn by civil war is suddenly faced with a much smaller tragedy, and precisely because of this nonsense.
A child is gone.
That's it.
Everything.
Saunders built the novel as a multitude of voices. Mazzoli and Vavrek had to do the opposite gesture: subtract, condense, choose. From about 117 characters of the book were extracted Willie, Lincoln, three main ghosts and a constellation of secondary figures capable of preserving that sense of disturbed and disordered community that inhabits the original.
And this is where the work finds its need.
Because a novel can make the dead speak through the written word.
Musical theatre can do something different.
Can assign to each a sound matter.
Not just a sentence.
A breath.
A register.
A density.
A wound turned into a stamp.
Missy Mazzoli and the creepy privilege of ghosts
Mazzoli told about having had some kind of lighting while composing: at some point she remembered that almost all the characters are dead.
The only live is Lincoln.
From there the voice writing could be freed.
Ghosts are not obliged to sing according to the conventions of the living.
They can deform the line.
Break the emission.
Obsessively order a sentence.
Produce unnatural sounds.
Bevins, the restless young man who took away his life, is characterized by an agitated voice, rich in ornaments. Elise Traynor, a teenage girl, is entrusted to a counterfeit, so that the youth of the voice acquires at the same time something fragile and strange.
It is a musicologically beautiful choice.
Because the operatic voice, for centuries, organized the body through recognizable categories: soprano, tenor, baritone, low; young heroine, lover, father, king, antagonist.
Mazzoli uses those categories to crack them.
In the barn It's not enough to know who you are.
You have to understand what have you become after death.
The orchestra also participates in this instability.
The composer maintains a substantially traditional organic, but introduces unusual percussion, deliberately harsh brass agreements, extensive string techniques — until the glass slipped on the ropes — and even a chorus of professionals called, at some point, to use kazoo.
Sounds like a little irreverence.
And instead it is a very serious dramaturgical choice.
Because death, in this work, is not continually solemn.
The dead of Saunders are vain, ridiculous, frightened, tender, obtuse, obscene, confused.
Just like the living.
And it's important.
Pain without irony would risk becoming monumental.
Mazzoli instead seeks a music capable of crying and, a moment later, to stumble.
As it often happens to life when it claims to be tragic without realizing that the daily continues to have loose shoes, embarrassing noises and people who say the wrong thing at the worst.
Pain does not always sing slowly
Here the contemporary work is faced with one of the oldest problems of musical theatre.
How do you put pain in music without exploiting it?
The loss of a child is dangerous matter.
It is very easy to ask the orchestra to move us.
There are enough sufficiently painful arches, some well chosen range, a dynamic that is thinned and the public will understand where it has to cry.
But this is administered emotion.
An authentically interesting work must do something more difficult.
He must leave us alone in front of the loss long enough to prevent us from consuming it as a show.
Mazzoli owns here a particularly personal relationship with the theme. In addition to compositional work, it also carries out activities as death doula, accompanying people and families in the process of dying. He explained that part of his reflection on death is inevitably confluent in the score.
This data does not guarantee, of course, the artistic value of a work.
But it helps to understand the attitude.
Death is not observed from afar.
It's not an elegant symbol.
It is a condition from which no one has a pass.
And maybe that's why the real subject of Lincoln in the Bardo It's not death.
It is what death makes visible:
love when it no longer has a body to turn to.
The President and the Father
Here Abraham Lincoln becomes teatrally interesting.
Because we all know the icon.
The president.
Civil war.
National history.
But the work must make an almost cruel reduction.
Remove the public man until he leaves only his father.
Peter Mattei therefore faces a role in which greatness cannot come from authority.
It must come from vulnerability.
It's an important change.
The only living character of the work is likely to be, emotionally, the closest to the dead.
Because mourning produces this experience.
Keep breathing.
You keep walking.
The others keep talking.
The day continues to have hours.
But something within us remained on the other side.
That's why the barn works so well as musical metaphor.
It doesn't just describe where the dead are.
It also describes the place where they remain, for a certain time, those who survive.
The mourning is a bard of the living.
A time when the loved one is no longer present, but has not yet become a memory.
It's still called.
Searched.
Wait.
Almost heard.
And the work, which for four centuries has lived the capacity to make present what is not there, becomes the ideal place to tell it.
100 years
Then the historical question remains.
We can't ignore her.
The Metropolitan Opera opened in 1883.
In 2026 Missy Mazzoli became the first composer to see his own work presented in the world from the theatre. In recent years, the Met had already performed works of women — from Kaija Saariaho to Jeanine Tesori and Gabriela Lena Frank — but it was already debuted elsewhere. With Lincoln in the BardoFor the first time, a composer receives from the Met that symbolically more radical space: the moment when a work is not simply accepted, but born.
The temptation would be to write:
"Finally. "
And indeed the word comes spontaneous.
That's not enough.
Because a first historian does not retroactively correct one hundred and forty-three years.
And above all, it should not turn Mazzoli into a symbol before even allowing her to be evaluated as a composer.
The interesting question is not:
"How did a woman finally get to Met? "
The most inconvenient question is:
How many works do we not know because for a long time certain people have not been put in the condition of getting there?
The musical canon is not only the set of masterpieces that the time has selected.
It is also the result of the institutions that could commission, represent, publish, repeat, record.
A work survives if someone gives them enough opportunities to exist.
Talent is necessary.
But the talent that does not meet a stage is likely to remain a private possibility.
And the history of music is full not only of forgotten works.
It is full of works that did not even have the possibility of being forgotten, because they were never put in the condition of being born.
This is the true historical significance of 19 October.
Not the fact that a woman suddenly enters the temple.
But that an institution recognizes, with enormous delay, that the temple had been built leaving too many closed doors.
Directing: a cemetery that doesn't want to look dead
The production of Lileana Blain-Cruz avoids, at least in the declared intentions and in the preparatory materials, the realistic cemetery.
Adam Rigg imagined a landscape of trees and vegetation inspired by Oak Hill Cemetery, but transformed into a suspended, unreal space. The costumes of Montana Levi Blanco cross different eras and physically show the passage of time: historical silhouettes on which moss, mold, decomposition.
It is a very interesting scenic idea.
The dead bring time on the body.
They don’t just wear a vintage costume.
They wear what time has done to their age.
Production also uses puppets, illusions, pyrotechnic effects, plant creatures, metamorphoses and even a live horse. Some ghosts literally enter into others; someone disappears; a woman can turn into pigs and a burning furnace.
The risk is obvious.
A work on death can become a gigantic park of the afterlife.
But the choice can work just if the stage prodigy does not replace emotion.
Saunders' fantastic doesn't make death more spectacular.
Make it more human.
Because each ghost keeps telling their story.
And as long as he tells it, he can't leave.
The work as a place where the dead insist
In the end, however, all this brings us back to a very ancient question.
Why does the work speak so well with the dead?
Orpheus descends into the Hades.
Don Giovanni is dragged into the abyss.
Lucia sings almost from another world.
Violetta dies while the music returns, for a few moments, a force that the body no longer possesses.
Mimi seems to leave before the others even notice.
Wotan talks to what's going to disappear.
Butterfly prepares his death as the last act of freedom.
The musical theatre has always had a strange familiarity with the border.
Perhaps because the song is already, in itself, something unreal.
No one in daily life communicates a family tragedy on a La bemolle supported by the orchestra.
And for this reason the work can say a truth that realism cannot always reach.
When a person talks, we believe it.
When she sings, we understand that the words alone are no longer enough.
That's where the musical theatre begins.
Where the common language no longer contains enough space for what should be said.
What if the real ghost is the canon?
Finally, there is a coincidence almost too perfect.
Lincoln in the Bardo speaks of souls that remain blocked because they cannot accept that the world has changed.
It debuts in one of the most symbolically powerful places in the Western operatic tradition.
It would be easy to make a coarse allegory.
No need.
But the question remains suggestive.
Can cultural institutions also live in a kind of bard?
Can they continue to repeat rituals, repertoires, hierarchies and habits because they fear that changing means losing themselves?
The Metropolitan, of course, must continue to represent Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, Mozart.
The new must not replace the repertoire.
You must have enter into conversation with it.
This is the point.
An opera house does not remain alive because it stops guarding the past.
He remains alive when the past does not prevent him from producing present.
A house that performs perfectly only dead works risks, ironically, to become the most elegant of the cemeteries.
A great theatre must instead allow someone, sometimes, to write a music of which we do not yet know destiny.
Why La traviataOne evening, it was contemporary music.
Also ♪.
Also Tristan.
Also Wozzeck.
The canon is not born canonical.
It becomes so because someone had the courage to stage something that still had no guarantee of history.
The night of 19 October
When the curtain rose, the Metropolitan stood in front of two first at the same time.
The first of a work.
And the first institutional possibility.
Missy Mazzoli must be judged for what he wrote, not for the anagraphic or symbolic data that accompanies her.
On October 19, it was not important because a composer "merits an applause" as a woman.
It would be an almost paternalistic way of turning a conquest into a concession.
It was important because, for the first time, the Met entrusted to a woman what she entrusted to men for decades:
the right to risk.
The right to write a great or imperfect work.
To move or divide.
To be discussed.
To succeed.
Even fail.
True artistic equality also begins there: when we do not ask someone to represent an entire category, but we simply allow him to be an author.
And maybe there could be no more suitable work to cross this threshold.
Why Lincoln in the Bardo He's talking about voices that were too long suspended.
Votes that keep calling.
Votes that they couldn't go any further.
Voices asking to be heard before they can finally let go of what keeps them.
On October 19, for the first time in one hundred and forty-three years, a new work composed of a woman was born on the stage of the Metropolitan.
Then the lights went down.
The orchestra began.
The dead have entered.
And for a few hours the question was no longer who had the right to write the story of the work until today.
The question was much more human.
What remains of us when someone we love is gone?
Maybe there's a voice left.
Maybe a gesture.
Perhaps a phrase that we continue to repeat even when there is no one to tell.
Maybe that's why we invented music.
Because some people stop being present.
But within us they don't stop talking immediately.
And when words are no longer enough to hold them back,
The song remains.
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