The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay
Composer
mason bates
Premiere
Indiana University Jacobs School of music • 2024
Commissioned by
The METROPOLITAN OPERA
Based on Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, two Jewish cousins invent an anti-fascist superhero and launch their own comic-book series, hoping to recruit America into the fight against Nazism. Incorporating scintillating electronic elements and a variety of musical styles, composer Mason Bates’ eclectic score moves seamlessly among the three worlds of Gene Scheer’s libretto: Nazi-occupied Prague, the bustling streets of New York City, and the technicolor realm of comic-book fantasy.
Financial Times
“It’s a tricky business transforming a novel into an opera, but librettist Gene Scheer knows his craft, and has managed to create a highly effective drama.”
Photos by Evan Zimmerman (Metropolitan Opera)
Previous Performances
Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, 2024
The Metropolitan Opera, 2025
Critical ACCLAIM
— Opera World
Metropolitan Opera • 2025
“The themes addressed in Scheer’s libretto are fully relevant and take on a special resonance in these weeks, when the end of the war in Gaza seems to usher in an uncertain glimmer of peace. Although the plot focuses on Jewish characters in their struggle against oppression, the opera contains enough elements to leave all lovers of freedom and justice, regardless of their ancestry, feeling challenged and inspired. This universality of the message—the need to resist fanaticism and barbarism—connects the historical narrative with the moral urgency of the present.”
— The New York Times
Metropolitan Opera • 2025
“Scheer has wrestled with big books before, and he knows how to craft a story.”
— Opera Now
Metropolitan Opera • 2025
“Scheer makes fine, singable sense of the busy plot in which Joseph Kavalier wisely leaves Prague in 1939 to escape the Nazis and goes to his cousin, Sam Klay, in Brooklyn. It’s complex: the work is about love, war, readjusting to a new life, grief, loss, guilt, changing social mores and more. Bates and Scheer handle these complexities with panache and honesty.”
— Die Deutsche Bühne
Metropolitan Opera • 2025
“Scheer's libretto places the Jewish experience at its core as a motivating force. The narrative is firmly anchored in the political era of World War II; the Holocaust serves as more than just a backdrop, and the deportation scene in the freight car, permeated with echoes of ‘Ani Ma'amin’ (a prayer on Jewish beliefs), provides a political framework for the evening without weighing it down.”
— OperaWire
Metropolitan Opera • 2025
“An immigrant and a gay man join forces to create art that defeats Nazis. While this simple sentence reduces all the complexities at play in ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,’ it also gets to the core of a battle that permeates to this day and provides us with the kind of hope that only art can provide. Bates and Scheer’s new opera delivers. Opera rings brightest when audiences can sit with characters, their feelings, and the music. This is not often the strength of contemporary pieces. ‘Kavalier and Clay’ is one of the exceptions. The plot is far from convoluted and the scenes manage a solid pace that immerses us with the characters and allows the music ample time to breathe and develop. We grow to love these characters, their hopes and dreams, their relationships, and ultimately, their fates. ‘Kavalier and Clay,’ is full of poetic gestures, and moments that truly sear into your heart and mind. By contrast, but also to the libretto’s credit, a repetitive riff on the word ‘Dick’ during a gay party is tastefully executed and hilarious at the same time.”
— Broadway World
Metropolitan Opera • 2025
“Librettist Sheer showed with last season’s Moby-Dick that he knows how to wrestle a mammoth piece of writing down to size. By narrowing the scope of Kavalier, he gave it focus and clarity.”
— New York Classical Review
Metropolitan Opera • 2025
“Scheer’s adaptation elegantly and eloquently gets at both the personal and global tragedies and triumphs in the story.”
— Theater Mania
Metropolitan Opera • 2025
“Opera may not be the first thing that comes to mind with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but the Met’s season opener had me convinced—and hooked—from the very first orchestral swell. It soars in the superhero realm, devastates in the human one, and, most importantly, offers an accessibility that won’t send newcomers to the opera running for the exit. Chabon’s expansive novel could easily power a whole new Ring Cycle, so it’s no surprise that Scheer trims the sprawl. Most importantly, the show leads the Met into a brave new world. Kavalier & Clay feels unlike anything I’ve ever seen at this storied old palace. Cinematic in scope, fast paced in its delivery, and propelled by a digestibility that you don’t often get in the world of opera, it’s a perfect introduction for new audiences who are looking to test the waters of opera or want an interesting date night. If the post-Covid world of live performance is all about cultivating the next generation of spectators, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay might just be the key to the future.”
— Olyrix
Metropolitan Opera • 2025
“The adaptation by Bates and Scheer makes no mistake. The opera succeeds in condensing this great novel into some three hours without sacrificing any fanciful scenes while maintaining the coherence of the story.”
— Bachtrack
Metropolitan Opera • 2025
“Bates and Scheer’s Kavalier & Clay succeeds in evoking Chabon’s novel’s central paradox: that art offers the illusion of freedom even as it confronts us with the weight of what cannot be left behind or escaped.”
— The New York Review of Books
Metropolitan Opera • 2025
“Even pared down, the opera is densely populated and crowded with incident. Scheer is by now adept at such downsizing, having previously adapted An American Tragedy and Moby-Dick, and his libretto’s invisible stitchwork of compression and condensation is impressive. If the scope of Chabon’s novel—with all its teeming side details of financial, legal, and political machinations, not to mention its annotated tour of New York in the 1940s—is necessarily reined in, Scheer manages to crystallize much of its essence while maintaining a brisk tempo.”
— Welt
Metropolitan Opera • 2025
“The operagoer had every reason to be skeptical. How can you turn Chabon’s thick novel into an opera and why? But while watching and listening at the Metropolitan Opera, those doubts vanished within the first fifteen minutes. Scheer has chosen wisely from the source material: his opera spans a few years, roughly from 1939 to 1944 and concentrates on just a handful of characters. That the whole thing is highly political actually goes without saying. It's about immigrants, war, cruel authorities, and the question of whether art has any effect in the real world: America is the home of all the desperate, the libretto states at one point, the coast to which all those who are hopelessly persecuted can flee. Did it only seem that way to the operagoer, or was there a large golden key glowing in the background at this point? The opera recalls an America that still fought against fascism and liberated people.”
Feature COVERAGE
Michael Chabon's novel is a page-turner. It's over 600 pages long, filled with incident and detail, and takes place in Prague and New York City during World War II and in the world of comic books. The opera, which runs about three hours with intermission, has music by Mason Bates and a libretto by Gene Scheer. Reporter Jeff Lunden talks with the people who brought the tale of two cousins who create a superhero comic book, kind of like "Superman," to the opera stage.
— The Brooklyn Rail
Gene Scheer with George Grella
Gene Scheer is a songwriter—his “American Anthem” is famous—and stage performer, and a lyricist for other composers. He’s also one of the major opera librettists in contemporary music. He’s tackled the adaptation of major literary works for the stage: Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy with composer Tobias Picker; Moby-Dick for Jake Heggie; and, premiering at the Metropolitan Opera, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. In late July, Scheer talked over a Zoom connection about how he made this work.
Suddenly, the entire Met proscenium fills with dazzling projections—individual pencil strokes become line drawings, taking on more and more detail and building into intricate comic-book panels, which zip through whizz-bang action sequences and then bloom into vivid color. There, before the audience’s very eyes, is the Escapist, in a skin-tight suit emblazoned with a golden key, scaling skyscrapers, running along the roof of a speeding train, and punching Nazis in the face. It is a thrilling moment of theater and one that encapsulates the way Bates and Scheer’s new opera translates the exhilarating experience of reading Michael Chabon’s modern classic. “The novel has such incredible energy, such an incredible sense of adventure and creation,” says Scheer, whose task it was to condense the nearly 700-page tome and package it for performance on the operatic stage.
— Works & Process
The Metropolitan Opera: Kavalier & Clay
Guggenheim Works & Process presents The Metropolitan Opera’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. With special guests Met Opera General Director Peter Gelb, Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, composer Mason Bates, librettist Gene Scheer, director Bartlett Sher, and performances by Miles Mykkanen, Andrzej Filończyk, and Sun-Ly Pierce.