Get Lit: George Saunders' 'Lincoln in the Bardo,' Now An Opera at the Met

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo was named one of the 20 best books of the 21st century by The New York Times. Now, it's set to head on stage at the Metropolitan Opera.

Andrew Manea: [singing] Dear little chap, dear little chap, always do the right thing to do and would urge me to do it. I will do it, although it is hard.

Alison Stewart: Later this hour, you're going to hear a sneak preview of that opera with special live performances from Lincoln in the Bardo cast members. First, we'll hear from the man behind the story that started it all, author George Saunders.

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Alison Stewart: George Saunders had already been writing short stories for years when he published his first novel, a story of grief and love with an unusual structure. The story takes place over the course of one night in a Georgetown cemetery. Abraham Lincoln is grieving the death of his 11-year-old son Willie. Late at night, with no one else around, Lincoln heads to the graveyard to hold the body of his beloved boy, but it turns out there are souls around. They're just dead.

The graveyard is populated by ghosts, spirits who are lingering in the strange space between life and the afterlife. Most of them don't realize they're dead. They think they're resting in sick boxes and might get better at any moment. When the ghost of Willie Lincoln arrives in the graveyard, three spirits, Reverend Everly Thomas, Hans Vollman, and Roger Bevins III, decide to help the boy move on to the afterlife, but President Lincoln's arrival in the graveyard changes everything.

Lincoln in the Bardo took home the Booker Prize in 2017. It has been adapted into an opera, and a movie version is in the works, starring Tom Hanks as Lincoln. The novel was our September Get Lit! Book Club selection in a special collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera. George Saunders joined us for the evening. Let's dive into our conversation.

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Alison Stewart: When you wrote this book, you were already well-known as a short-story writer. Did this book expand out of a short story, or was a novel always in the making?

George Saunders: It didn't expand. This book has about a 30-year history because I first heard the story about Lincoln going into his son's crypt. I don't remember the year, but Bill Clinton was president.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

George Saunders: Yes, and I was four years old.

[laughter]

George Saunders: We literally drove by the cemetery and a relative of my wife pointed up at a certain crypt and said, "Willie Lincoln was buried there, and the newspapers reported that his father was so grief-stricken that he went in." I was like, "Who's Willie Lincoln?" That was the first thing. Then I researched it, and that actually was in the newspapers. At that point, I started to think about it.

I thought that would be a great book for somebody to write, but I didn't think there was an intersection between what I knew how to do and what the book would require. I just kept waiting. Then finally, I don't know, it was maybe 20 years later, I thought this is the time or, otherwise, my gravestone is going to say, "Avoided what he most longed to do," that kind of thing.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

George Saunders: I just gave myself a six-month contract where I wouldn't tell anybody about it, but I'd try it, because it was different for me. It was more earnest, a little less funny, I guess.

Alison Stewart: Well, one thing I learned about you is that you have a degree in geophysical engineering. How does your science brain work with the creative writing side of your brain?

George Saunders: Well, actually, I went to this place called the Colorado School of Mines. Not like mimes, but mines.

Alison Stewart: M-I-N-E-S.

George Saunders: Yes, I had a major in glass-wall walking. One of the things they taught us, the mantra was no partial credit, which meant if you got to the end of a long proof and you got it wrong, you got zero. I actually found that really useful as a writer because there's not necessarily a connection between effort and result. You have to keep trying. If you get into draft 50 and it still stinks, it still stinks That sounds bleak when I say it that way. For me, that's a lot of it is you can't think that because you've done it a million times is good, and then you have to ascend to a different level where you're really in touch with what you think is good. That's where I think a lot of the stuff happens.

Alison Stewart: Did that help you with your revisions?

George Saunders: Oh, so much, yes. The other part, of course, in engineering school is if something goes wrong in an equation, you can see where eventually, if you look closely. In writing stories, that's my philosophy, is you just start reading it. If you feel good about it, great. No revision necessary. If you get to a place where the energy drops, then the first thing you have to do is admit it. That's the hard part because, usually, if your story goes bad, you just think it's fine. It was fine yesterday. I'm not going to worry about it.

Then I think the more professional response is to turn to the story and say, "What's happening?" The story will go, "Nothing to see here. Keep going." Almost like you're a parent. You got to say, "No, come on, the story. Come sit in my lap. We're going to talk about this." That was from engineering, because if something has gone wrong, it's gone wrong at a certain place in the text, so then you can come back and examine.

Alison Stewart: You have been very honest that people have come to you at book signing and said, "I really wanted to get into the book, but I couldn't get past page 30." You even did an online video for how to read Lincoln in the Bardo.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: I watched it. First of all, what is it about page 30 that people get stuck?

George Saunders: I don't know, but people would be really irate. They would always give me the damn page number, "Page 30, and I threw it across the room with my husband."

Alison Stewart: For people watching and listening who haven't read the book yet, what advice do you have for them, how to get into Lincoln in the Bardo?

George Saunders: Go watch that video. That would be fun. No, part of the weirdness was I worked really hard to make, I thought, the widest doorway I could so people could get into the book, but it's got a strange form. I think the one thing I would say is, well, maybe a cheat, which is the first guy is dead. Then after that, just watch the way his language gets weird. That will tell you that he's dead, and then it'll open the book to you. Basically, I feel like it's totally fine if it's difficult. There's no problem.

I think, actually, after all these years of hearing that, there's maybe different neurological patterns to reading. This book is made of all monologues. I have a feeling that even very good readers, there's a moment where they can't assemble the monologues into a physical scene. Then at some point, it gets to be too much to carry in the bucket, and they move on. I know people who've read James Joyce's Ulysses, but couldn't get into this one. It's no blame. No blame. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: When you started researching Abraham Lincoln, what detail that you learned in your research, it really helped you inform your approach to the character?

George Saunders: The biggest one, there was a book called The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, which is a really amazing book. It's just a factual account of everything snotty or heartless somebody said about or to Lincoln during his presidency. It's a big, thick book. He was really hated by a lot of people for a lot of reasons. There was something about that. I knew about his son passing away. I also knew that he and Mary had a big party in the White House that it would be hard not to link to the kid's death. They got sick. They were sick during it, actually, and then they got worse after.

Then the third thing about him being so hated at that point-- and, actually, he was doing a pretty bad job at that point. He hadn't quite figured it out, so I thought that's so human to have not just one problem, but the world sometimes seems to just load it up. It made me so sympathetic for this poor man who's in a graveyard in the freezing cold, and nothing's going right. I thought, "Well, that's the test, really." It's one thing to have a great spirit when everything's going beautifully, but when the world is loading these disasters on you one after the next, then we find out who you are.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. In the book, there are a series of factual events based on real text. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Elizabeth Keckley, who is Mary Todd Lincoln's dressmaker. Those are real. Some of them aren't. What did you want to accomplish with these primary sources, the ones that are real?

George Saunders: My thing about stories is you want to keep it simple. Don't do anything crazy or experimental, unless the text tells you you have to. In this book, I had one draft which was all ghosts and Lincoln. Something about it felt like there was just too many ghosts. Ghosts are like dream sequences. You can do whatever you want. At some point, the reader's patience just gets a little thin.

Also, in reading that draft, I wasn't being moved by it, really. I thought, "Well, why not?" The answer was, well, because you know a bunch of background stuff about the party, about Lincoln's unpopularity, that the audience has no way of knowing. I do a lot of talking to myself when I'm writing, and I say, "Yes, that's a problem." Then part of my brain said, "Well, how do you know it?" "Well, I read it."

The other part said, "Are you proposing that we plagiarize these texts and put them in verbatim?" I'm like, "Yes," and then the other part said, "Well, it's your book." [chuckles] It was really just a response to the fact that the history was lacking. I could have rewritten it, but whenever I did, it seems less somehow. I just put that in. Then at some point in that party sequence at the beginning of the book, it was going pretty well.

There was something I wanted to communicate. The real-life text was about four pages long. I'm like, "I can't put a big goiter in my own book," so I thought, "Well, I could rewrite it." That would be a fake history section. This was before fake news became a negative thing. It was really just a matter of trying to come up with creative ways to respond to the needs that the book was presenting in real time.

Alison Stewart: The story takes place in a graveyard. Did you go to the graveyard where Willie was?

George Saunders: Yes. Actually, the first time we went, we couldn't find Willie Nelson's-- Willie Nelson's.

[laughter]

George Saunders: Yes, we couldn't find Willie Nelson's crypt. We couldn't find Willie Lincoln's crypt. I almost gave it up. Actually, the same cousin of my wife's who had told me this story in the first place, and this is now probably 15 years later, just happened to find it and called me over. That was a big moment because I was predisposed to not write it. Missy and I were just there recently.

Standing in front of that crypt, you're like, "Okay, whatever else we know, Lincoln stood here for sure." You go to the chapel, and there's a door. Lincoln, at the worst moment of his life, walked through there. A kind of artistic, I guess, pride said, "Look, man, if you can't make a book out of this, this thing that actually happened, then you shouldn't be doing it." That was a day when I decided to give it a try.

Alison Stewart: Are any of the narrators or the ghosts, people in the graveyard, near Willie's tomb?

George Saunders: No. At one point, I did this thing where I went through and recorded 200 names from there. I thought, "Okay, I'll do research." Then I thought, in a way, that's disrespectful one. It's inhibiting, too, because if I know this person's history, I'm going to feel obligated to be faithful to it. A novel doesn't really work that way. A novel has things it's designed to do. Being factual actually isn't one of them. It's like you could have a car and use it as a paperweight, but why? If you're making a novel, the invention is the point. I just freed myself by saying, "No, these are all made-up people, and I get to make up their lives."

Alison Stewart: You told a piece in The Guardian that you tried to inject a really long-winded and omniscient gravedigger into the book.

George Saunders: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Tell us about the grave digger.

George Saunders: That's always a good move for the beginning writers, always would do that. Yes, no, because, originally, I knew that Lincoln was going to be there at night. You're looking at writing a 300-page book from the point of view of Lincoln, which I just did not-- Lincoln's rough. Lincoln's writing a book from the point of view of Jesus or something. It's a lot. Then you start thinking, "How else can I narrate this?" The only other living person that would be there would be a grave digger practicing, I don't know, something. That ruled that out. That's actually when the ghosts came in because if you ask yourself, "Who's in a graveyard at night?" Ghosts.

Alison Stewart: Aside from the main trio, which we'll talk about in a moment, who was your favorite ghost to write?

George Saunders: Well, actually, you'll see her tonight, Elise Traynor. She exists. Willie Lincoln is in this place the day after his death or a few days after his death in spirit form. The rules of the world are such that he really shouldn't be there. It's a dangerous place for a young spirit. To try to indicate this to Willie, the other ghosts show him this young girl, Elise Traynor, who died at 14 and resisted the next step to go to heaven, wherever. In this world, there's a cost.

She was really fun because that's where the book got, for me, both dark and light because it's terrifying to narrate a 14-year-old girl who dies in the prime of her life and is resisting it. In depicting her, the kind of ecstasy and agony that she had was so deep to write. I thought, "Okay, this book is going deeper. Now, it has a potential to go lighter, because I hope she's going to get out of there." Sometimes you hit a place in a book that is difficult. Then when you break through it, that's always a nice feeling.

Alison Stewart: Who was hard to write? Which ghost?

George Saunders: Well, honestly, none of them were that hard, actually. The whole book was weird. It was exceptional for me, maybe because I waited so long, or because the material is so big. It was never toil. It was work, but it was never toil. I would literally just show up and go, "Okay, I have to get Lincoln from point A to point B. Let it happen and just start walking with him." Ghosts would come up, and I knew who they were. It was very strange. I haven't had that experience before. The one part, there's a long place where one of the characters actually does succeed in going on to the judgment place. This bardo in this world is like the DMV.

[laughter]

George Saunders: You just go there, and you wait and wait and wait. One of the characters, the Reverend, gets to go over into the next-- He gets a peek over the fence. That wasn't hard to write. I wrote it really quickly, and then I went, "Oh, I don't know." Something about it was so much-- I don't know if it was bigger than the rest of the book, but it was longer. It had a religious feeling to it. In those cases, what I do is I put it in, and I say, "You're on probation. Let's see how you do." Read it the next day, and that came in and out of the book probably five or six times.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

George Saunders: Meanwhile, you're tuning it to make sure that it's its best self. If you're going to kick it out of the club, you want it to be dressed nicely. Then at one point, I took it out, and the book started bothering me. Boring me, really. At that point, you say, "That section has earned its way in, and you let it in," and then it's up to you to react to it and to accommodate that section and the rest of the book.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting to me that we don't hear that much from Willie. When you hear from him, it's a little bit fractured the way he talks. Why is that?

George Saunders: I think my thought was I wanted to show that this transition that he made isn't easy. I would say for the whole book up to the very end, he's disoriented. He literally just had this terrible wasting disease, then he's freed from his body. He's in this strange place. Part of the thing with him was he can't be too sure. In history, Willie was such a wonderful boy, they say. Very intelligent, witty, ornery, and very bright. When they got to the White House, he quickly adapted because that's who he was. I thought, "Okay, that's the model." He's going into the White House/his death. He doesn't really know where he is, but he's so bright that he adapts. I wanted to show him a little off his feet for the first three-quarters.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because you came to my show earlier this year to talk about Vigil. Both have ghosts. Bardo and Vigil both have ghosts. What is it about ghosts that you find so fascinating?

George Saunders: Honestly, what I found pretty young was that I can't really write a realist narrative in plain speech. I can do it, but it doesn't have any power. I'm always looking for something that will let me go up into a high register of language. Sometimes it's sci-fi. Sometimes it's really over-the-top interior monologues. The last two books, just somehow when you put a ghost in there, you have access to a different sense of time. Right now, a ghost from 1860 could walk through.

If you're narrating that, you have to do something different. Flannery O'Connor said, "A writer can choose what he writes, but he can't choose what he makes live." I wish I could go back in time and tell my young self that, because when you're a young writer, you always think, "I should write this. I want to write this. I want to be in this lineage," but talent doesn't actually care about that. Talent wants you to do what you can make come alive. For me, if I put some ghosts in there, I just suddenly get interested.

Alison Stewart: You're listening to my conversation with author George Saunders from our September Get Lit! Book Club event. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Let's dive back into my conversation with author George Saunders at our September Get Lit! Book Club event at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. As usual, the audience had great questions for our author. We'll hear some of those in just a minute. First, here's more of my conversation with George Saunders about his novel Lincoln in the Bardo.

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Alison Stewart: Our three main trio of ghosts, Reverend Thomas, who died while walking; Hans Vollman, who died before he could consummate his marriage, a plank fell on him; and Roger Bevins III is a gay man who felt thrown over when his lover left him for a woman, but then he changed his mind about a suicide. He said, "Oh, I want to live," but he doesn't. Who came to you first?

George Saunders: Vollman and Bevins were first. Actually, in that long period, I wrote a play. I think it had those two in it, but they had different deaths at that point. I always thought of them a little bit like the Scarecrow and the Tin Man. They were always buddies and were together. I carried them over and, yes, they were the first.

Alison Stewart: Why no Dorothy?

George Saunders: I don't know, actually. Well, she's Ms. Traynor, actually, in a way.

Alison Stewart: Did you always know that the three main characters would be men?

George Saunders: No. I think at one point, there was another tribe, but it got complicated because I felt like they had to be very intimate, the three of them. I thought, given the eras they were from, a woman might make that complicated because they would be formal around her. It's a lot of trial and error, really.

Alison Stewart: Who are the ghosts telling their stories to? Are they just announcing them?

George Saunders: Yes, that's a great one. I think they're two things. A lot of times, they're telling it to Willie because one of the places where the book caught fire for me was I had written it up to the place where Lincoln does his first visit. I stalled out a little bit. I was sitting doing something else, and I thought, "What else is going on in a graveyard?" I thought, "Well, there's lots of ghosts in there. What do they think of it?"

It struck me that for one of their number, a dead person, to attract the loving attention of a living person was a very rare thing. It never happened before that somebody would come in and touch one of them, so then I thought, "Oh, he's a celebrity in that world. He's the one person who did this unbelievable thing." Of course, they're attracted to him, and they want to come close to him. I thought, "What else do they want?" I had done a story for GQ years ago where I lived in a homeless camp in Fresno, kind of incognito.

The one thing I noticed was once they figured out that you weren't really supposed to be there, these people came to you. They wanted you to know who they were, wanted to tell you their stories. Sometimes being as difficult a place as it was, they would tell you the same story repetitively, as if trying to construct their identity. It was very touching in that context. That became Willie's thing. I don't remember the question, but that's the answer.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: This takes place in 1862, and there are Black ghosts in this world as well. How are you thinking about race when you're writing this book?

George Saunders: Well, at first, I thought, "I'm not going there. I don't want to be disrespectful. I'm not going to go there," so I didn't, except Elizabeth Keckley is in there, but she's not identified in the book. I thought, at some point, this is worse to have a book that's set a few months before the Emancipation Proclamation, and there's not a single Black voice represented. Then I think, "Okay, then my job is to do that with love and do it beautifully."

Okay, how do you do that? By not making any variation. In other words, when the Black ghosts come, imagine them with as much interest as you do the white ghost and let it work its way out. That was really it. Then years later, I found out that Mount Zion is nearby a cemetery. When I was researching it, the map showed about a mile of woods between the two, so it couldn't be adjacent.

That's another interesting idea about that book, because there would have been a wider range of people in that cemetery. The book, for me, it's like a lot of my work. I think of it as cartoonish, but in a positive sense. The characters are quite simple. All of them are quite cartoonish, really. That meant you could only have so many people from so many different levels of society.

Alison Stewart: We learned that unlike the other ghosts, the Reverend, he knows he's dead. He's not just in a sick box, but he runs away when he's about to be sent to probably our version of hell. He doesn't know why he's being sent there. Do you know why?

George Saunders: I do.

[laughter]

George Saunders: Thank you very much.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

George Saunders: No, this is what I mean. I wrote that scene, and it seemed clear to me that that was the most interesting thing that he ran away. He chose. Again, when I was younger, I would have said, "Oh, that's a problem, because I don't really know why he got--" As an older writer, you're like, "Okay, that's good. That means the book has a problem to get out of, essentially." I always say writing a book is like the problems are where the real power lies. It's like if Houdini said, "Now, I'm going to escape from this light windbreaker."

[laughter]

George Saunders: When he gets the chains going, and he gets in the coffin. When I got to that part with the Reverend, basically, the move is just to say, "Okay, noted, book, I have a question to answer," and then you keep going, and you wait for the moment. For me, the answer to that is there's a moment where he saves-- Well, not a spoiler, but he intervenes on Willie's behalf.

Now, he's going there for sure. There's a moment where he knows that he's just made this major intervention on Willie's behalf, probably saved him from hell, or something like it. He says, "I have to believe that even the smallest good intention is noticed by God," and off he goes. The only other clue is there's a look on his face that is not entirely unhappy, so I think he's fine, yes. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Let's go to the questions from the audience.

Audience Member 1: You address Buddhism in a lot of this in the Bardo, and I was wondering what your visions are for yourself in terms of Buddhism.

George Saunders: Well, so I am a Buddhist, and a good friend of ours who's a really serious practitioner said, "Well, you're a fellow traveler." I know something about it. Like a lot of writers, I can know something at a three and talk about it at a nine.

[laughter]

George Saunders: Basically, in this book, I took a lot of Buddhist ideas. The one that I really kept going back to was this idea that they say that when you're living, we have these wild minds, these monkey minds. When you're living, your mind is like a wild horse tied to a fence. You have this crazy mental phenomenon, but mostly, we can keep it under control, sort of. Then when you die, the rope gets cut, and the horse just goes crazy.

You read things like a person in those first moments after death will think of wherever, Paris, and be in Paris, or think of the past and be in the past. The other scary thing is your neurosis would also get writ large in those moments. That's how I thought of these characters. They weren't happy in life. At the moment of death, they were still agitated. Whatever that form of that agitation became physical for them.

Audience Member 2: Hello. My understanding of your last two books is that they do feature a heavy exploration of death and a reckoning with what you've done in your life. I'm imagining when you have conversations with your readers about their responses to your books, those themes come up a lot. I was just curious if you've noticed any patterns in what your readers seem to think or be concerned about with those.

George Saunders: That's a great question. Yes, thank you for that. This happened in San Francisco. There was a radio show, and the host got the idea to-- because we've been talking about death is something scary. You know that thing, Woody Allen, "I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be there when it happens," that kind of idea. The host took some calls. About seven people were recounting their experience at the deathbed of a loved one.

They were all such beautiful stories. Nobody was panicking. Nobody was afraid. It was all copacetic. I took a lot of comfort from that because I tend to imagine it a little more-- because, for me, one of the bedrock stories was Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy. If you haven't read it, it's such a beautiful, terrifying story. It'll change your life because it brings you to attention. He said he wrote that because a neighbor of his screamed for three straight days before dying.

I heard that story when I was about 19, like, "Oh, no." The good news was people, as we do, we find a way. If a person has had love in their life, even a little, it seems like, at the end, there's a possibility that that could predominate, especially with some help. That really made me feel good about the books and also good about what we're-- Well, not about death exactly, but good about human beings, actually, because of the seven callers, nobody had a disaster.

Alison Stewart: When were you first approached about making an opera out of Lincoln in the Bardo?

George Saunders: Many years. Eight, seven years ago, something like that, I think. I just heard that Missy Mazzoli was interested. I knew a little bit of her work, and I went and found out about it. I'm like, "Oh, my God." I went to the first meeting literally like, "George, don't screw it up. Just sit there and look very serious and then get out with a yes." It was a mind-blowing experience to have been a little bit involved in the opera so far, because what happened was moments that I had experienced in the writing of it where, for example, you're imagining a certain view, or you're really deep in a character's past.

Well, you use that. You make the book. The book comes out. Hearing the music has made those moments come alive in my mind again. These secret moments that nobody should know about or could know about, but it's there. It's a very beautiful opera, and it's also spectacular. When Missy and I first talked, I'm like, "Could we do like a circus?" I always thought the book was a circus, really, so that was what I wanted. From what I've seen so far, that's what they've done. I'm just thrilled about it and hope you'll all come.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with author George Saunders from the September Get Lit! Book Club event. We spent the month reading his Booker Prize-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. Up next, music from the operatic adaptation of Lincoln in the Bardo, which heads to the Metropolitan Opera this month. Stay with us.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In some ways, Lincoln in the Bardo is a novel that makes total sense for an opera. It has a large cast of characters with a lot to say. The stakes are life and death. Emotions are high, but there are also challenges. How do you portray ghosts with all their supernatural powers on stage? How do they write music for Abraham Lincoln to sing? How do you differentiate between the dead and the living?

Those challenges were tackled by American composer Missy Mazzoli and Canadian librettist Royce Vavrek, who are bringing their adaptation of Lincoln in the Bardo to the Metropolitan Opera, starting on October 19th. You'll hear my conversation with them in just a moment. They joined our September Get Lit! Book Club with author George Saunders. First, let's hear a sneak preview from the new opera. This is Anthony Roth Costanzo, who plays Ms. Traynor. Here he is setting up the aria.

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Ms. Elise Traynor. Imagine that you're 14 years old. You're about to feel love for the first time and all kinds of other things that come along with it, and then you die. You're stuck in a loop, and you can't get out of the bardo because you want so badly to feel these things and to go back into the real world. You're not ready to let go, and that's Ms. Elise Traynor as she talks about green grass and kind looks.

Alison Stewart: You play a 14-year-old girl.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: How'd you go about finding the character and figuring out how to play it?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: It's really interesting. As a countertenor, the voice sounds very different from the way I look. I'm always disembodied in an interesting way. What is the relationship between pitch and gender? What is the relationship between body and gender, self and voice? What does a physical voice actually express? These are things I think about all the time.

Every time I sing for a room of people, there's at least one who's never heard a countertenor. Usually, it's more than one, and it's somehow shocking. I think finding Ms. Elise Traynor is in that space. She's disembodied. She becomes pigs. She becomes a furnace. She becomes a vulture. She becomes many things. She cannot find herself, and she cannot find her voice. She was never given an opportunity. There's a sort of interesting similarity in Missy's choice and Royce's choice to make this role a countertenor role.

Alison Stewart: Anthony Roth Costanzo, thanks for joining us.

[applause]

Alison Stewart: Let's bring up librettist Royce Vavrek. Come on by.

[applause]

Alison Stewart: Missy, when did you and Royce first start talking about the opera?

Missy Mazzoli: We started talking about turning this book into an opera, basically, the second the book came out.

[laughter]

Missy Mazzoli: I'm a huge George fan. I feel safe saying that in this room because I know all of you are, too. He's really my favorite writer. When Lincoln in the Bardo came out, it actually coincided with the time when the Met called me into the office to offer me a commission. I have to give credit to Royce because he said, "We should just do Lincoln in the Bardo." We have this big canvas at the Met.

Alison Stewart: Royce, what makes this book a good fit for opera, and what makes it challenging?

Royce Vavrek: Like George, it wasn't an arduous thing to turn this book into a libretto. It was a complete and utter joy. It was a lot of work. I actually wrote a full draft of the libretto in about 10 days, but then workshopped it for nine months with Paul Cremo, who is just a genius dramaturg and who made sure that all of the I's were dotted, the T's were crossed, but it was, yes, just this labor of love, truly.

So many people come up and say, "How the heck would you adapt this? It seems so unwieldy. There are 166 voices in the novel. It is a very expansive world." For all of those reasons, I thought that it felt very grand, and it felt like there was a way forward, very specific, and beautiful. I do think that the novel is quite linear in many ways. It was just really distilling George's spirit and making sure that the spine, that the story remained intact, but that it had that joy and that George spirit.

Alison Stewart: Missy, I heard you once described with love as being punk rock.

Missy Mazzoli: Oh. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Yes?

Missy Mazzoli: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What's punk rock about the opera Lincoln in the Bardo?

Missy Mazzoli: I grew up playing in punk bands. That was the first thing I did musically. I grew up watching a ton of MTV, and that was how I made music. Music, to me, was all punk rock at the beginning. There was no other music. Later in life, now that I'm in my 40s, I've been able to combine all of these musical influences. I write classical music. I write opera, but bringing that punk rock ethos into it, where things change very quickly. You can do jump cuts from one character or scene to another, and that things can come out of nowhere, and that it just can be really radical. I tried to make an opera that was really, really radical, so playing with tradition. I love the operatic tradition, but I really wanted to turn it on its head this time.

Alison Stewart: This is your sixth opera with Missy. Is that true?

George Saunders: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How'd you become collaborators?

Royce Vavrek: It all started at Carnegie Hall. [laughs] I was doing a program, the young composers' workshops that Dawn Upshaw and Osvaldo Golijov used to run. I was presenting the first 20 minutes of an opera called Dog Days that became very important to me and foundational. Missy came to support some of her other composer friends and the collaborator on that project. She had a postcard and said, "Would you come and see the first 30-some minutes of my opera Song from the Uproar?" which would become our first opera that we did together. It was a beautiful moment where Missy approached me and said, "Please come see my show," and then we had lunch a few weeks after that.

Missy Mazzoli: I said, "Will you please help me finish this show?"

Royce Vavrek: I said, "Yes."

[laughter]

Royce Vavrek: I'm very glad I did.

Alison Stewart: Missy, my final question. When people go see Lincoln in the Bardo, is there any point you really want them to pay close attention to?

Missy Mazzoli: I'll tell you my favorite part. One of the challenges in writing the opera was that it centers around a dead child. It's very, very sad. For me to write music for these characters, I really have to inhabit them. At the beginning of this process, I was really like, "I don't know if I can do this. This is a lot to carry every day at the writing desk." This is obviously inspired by the way that George wrote the text for Willie Lincoln at the end, but I decided that Willie Lincoln was going to be having the time of his life at the end of this opera.

He was going to be having a great time. He sings this aria called All is Allowed Me Now. Again, it was a collaboration, but much of the text is in the novel. I was like, "What an amazing way to think of death that, for him, all of a sudden, he can go down to the party. He can fly out the window. He can swing from the chandelier. He can drink rum and eat candy." That is where the opera literally takes off, in my view, so I hope people are excited about that.

Alison Stewart: Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek, thank you so much for joining us.

Missy Mazzoli: Thank you so much.

[applause]

Alison Stewart: We've got one more song for you to hear tonight. Please welcome Andrew Manea to the stage.

[applause]

Alison Stewart: Andrew, what version of Abraham Lincoln do we see in this opera?

Andrew Manea: Here for this particular aria, it's called Dear Little Chap. Lincoln is reminiscing a little bit about his son Willie and finally saying goodbye, letting go, and coming to grips with what has happened, and that he does have to move on and run a country.

Alison Stewart: That was a special performance from the upcoming Metropolitan Opera production of Lincoln in the Bardo at our September Get Lit! Book Club event. Lincoln in the Bardo begins its run on October 19th. That's All Of It for today. I'm Alison Stewart. Have a great weekend, and I'll meet you back here next time.

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