The Brooklyn Rail

Gene Scheer is a songwriter—his “American Anthem” is famous—and stage performer, and a lyricist for other composers. Expand that last in every way, and 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 on September 21, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Michael Chabon’s novel is the story of Joe Kavalier, a Czech refugee from Nazi Europe, and his cousin Sammy Clayman, who create the anti-fascist comic book hero the Escapist. In late July, Scheer talked over a Zoom connection about how he made this work.

George Grella (Rail): How do you take prose and transform it into an opera libretto, sung rather than read?

Gene Scheer: I think there’s a basic misunderstanding of librettos: people say, “You write the words?” Of course, but the principal task is to figure out what’s happening on stage, and what are the structural gestures that can invite music in to tell the story. A successful opera depends on everything being right, of course, but it’s the music, I always say, that is the marrow of the matter. The music is why we’re there. And so the task for a librettist, I think, is to create the scaffolding so that the music can build the cathedral.

I’m always thinking about this, also maybe a little bit from my experience having been an actor on stage back in the day; what are people doing on stage, what’s at stake in the scene? With Kavalier & Clay, I was really looking to be true to the spirit of Chabon’s intentions, but not to the letter of what he wrote—he was the narrator, and the voice is the narrator in an opera, the voice of the composer. Mason Bates is the person who is creating all the sinew that connects everything.

No way you can get all the background information in an opera. It just drops dead on stage. And the other thing is to be careful not to be too literary, the words too obtuse. There is a delivery mechanism for an opera which is much more direct than the process of reading, where you’re reflecting on language; you can read a passage more slowly, and so forth. Music is going by, and you want people to be able to hold on to and emotionally connect to what’s happening on stage.

So Kavalier & Clay was very challenging, because first of all it’s a beautiful book, and has a lot of aspects that are very challenging operatically. The principal one is the length of the story. There are very few operas that take place over twenty years—War and Peace, okay—but it’s much more like La Bohème or Tosca, over a few days. That was a big challenge, and also the amount of detail in the story is enormous, and it’s so satisfying when you’re reading it. Before I wrote a word, I was trying to figure out how I could distill this down into a structure that would work operatically in order to depict what’s happening in the emotional core.

I think Mason really has done a great job of getting the feeling of reading Kavalier & Clay. It’s this incredible, sizzling energy, of these two guys coming in and confronting these incredible, tragic circumstances in the world. And they dreamt of creating something. And it’s brimming with energy and promise and, of course, heartbreak—that’s what we were trying to depict. When I’m writing a libretto, the gestures are, by definition, broader. The music is where the subtlety is. I need to set it up so that the music can win the day. That’s the task.

Rail: How much back and forth went on with Bates? Or do you deliver the whole thing?

Scheer: It’s somewhere in between. First of all, I write an outline that no one sees, with way too much detail. Then get it down to like thirteen or fourteen pages. That’s when I start sharing it. And then it gets more succinct, six or seven pages. And then I start talking to Mason about the story, how the libretto will be constructed. And as I said, how can music depict this story?

The fulcrum came when I had this notion of creating three different musical, visual, and structural worlds that depict the three major aspects of the story. There’s the world of Prague, of the Holocaust, his family and what Joe left that’s informing the grief and heartbreak that he experiences when he’s in New York. Then there’s the world of the Chrysler Building, swing jazz, that immigrant energy, those immigrants who created this artistic energy of America in the late 1930s into the ’40s. And then, of course, there’s the world of the art that they create, The Escapist, and the other comic books that are being created, Luna Moth and such. I thought, if I could create three different worlds that had three different looks and three different musical sonorities, that would be a way of structuring fifteen years. And that’s what we did, that’s what Mason has done so beautifully; he’s created these three distinct worlds, and the visual artists have done the same. This is the way of taking music and depicting the emotional reality of Michael’s book, of the grief and Joe’s anger.

Rail: Have you put more emphasis on Joe than Sam?

Scheer: No, I’ve been talking about Joe; Sam’s arc is just as important and I think beautifully brought to life in the opera, I really do. Sam’s story was a little easier to tell, because it’s one narrative of his repressed homosexuality, his loss of his dad, the polio that he had as a kid. All of these things are a line. And he can’t bear the idea of acknowledging who he is. I think that story is powerfully brought to life. There’s an aria when he and Rosa are making the decision to be together, making the decision that so many people made, throughout history, where he just could not acknowledge who he was, and I think it’s really heartbreaking. And then there’s a little bit of hope at the end that he might be able to live more honestly. They are two major parallel stories, Sam and Joe—they intersect as they create this character and love each other and deeply care about each other.

Rail: Are you working directly with dialogue from the novel?

Scheer: I used dialogue from the book that I thought could work, for example the scene in which they are creating the idea of the Escapist, and this notion of why versus what and who and how—the real question is why. It has this emotional thing that’s going, it’s starting here, and it’s building—it’s like Bolero. It’s building more and more energy as the scene goes through.

A person can sing for four minutes on eight lines of text. It’s not a question of reinventing the story, but reinventing the delivery mechanism—a different language was required. And they talk the way we’re talking right now, because that’s who they are. They’re New Yorkers, Jewish New Yorkers. And Joe has the issue of English being a second language and so forth. We try to bring all of that into it. But I had to create a lot of the text. Hopefully it feels consistent with the characters that Michael has so beautifully written. Also, there’s a simplicity. You think about great operas, if people can say, “amore, amore, amore,” and all of a sudden, it sounds really pretty wonderful, because they have the music saying how truthful the moment feels.

Rail: You’re hinting at a fascinating situation for the librettist, which is that you’re working with multiple languages. Your Herman Melville language is one thing, Chabon’s language is another thing. And there’s Mason Bates’s language. You’re threading a lot of needles there.

Scheer: That’s absolutely true. The task is to juggle all of these aspects. Doing this novel was Mason’s idea, not my idea. I read the book when it came out and liked it. And then the Met put Mason and I together because they thought I would be a good match for this project. And then I reread the book, and I could see why Mason responded, because of who he is, and because of how his music is. When you think about a composer creating the fantasy cartoon characters, Mason does that, and when I posited the idea of these three distinct worlds, and that he could have three different musics, it really was a good fit.

Rail: When did you start working on this?

Scheer: Of all the questions, this should be the simplest one. But I’ll tell you—about ten days ago was my mom’s seventh Yahrzeit, and when my mom was in the hospital, ultimately dying, I told her I had this job. I think the rights were still being procured. I remember reading to her. She said that she had read the book, but I read to her the opening four or five pages.

So I’d say about five years ago I started working on this, and it took me a good two years to write, which seems crazy when you see how little text is on the page, but again, it’s not about the amount of text that’s on the page. It’s about the story. How are you going to take that slab of marble and keep chiseling away until it’s the form you want? That took me a long time.

And there were more revisions as I worked with Mason and with the Met. We did a workshop, which was kind of a sing-through, at the Met with wonderful, wonderful young singers, and I rewrote the ending. I’m happy with it now; we rewrote the last ten minutes. We didn’t just change words. There’s that wonderful Mike Tyson line: “Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the mouth.” And when you hear things sung, you learn certain things.

I added an aria, a short one for Joe. I thought he was a little bit underwritten, so we added something for him late in the piece, and then a very short trio at the end, which I think is very, very sweet. And it’s not just their singing. Something happens at that moment.

Rail: Here is a story about a refugee from fascist Europe and his cousin—they create this superhero whose goal is to free people from concentration camps, and that’s going on stage at the Met. And here we are in America, and we’re building concentration camps, and secret police are kidnapping refugees. Kavalier & Clay and the opera precede this, but do you see the opera in a different way?

Scheer: Well, isn’t that always the case? Works of art are reinterpreted based on the context of the times. And I think it’s a mistake, for me anyway, to try to write to the moment, rather than write what feels truthful to the human experience. If it’s truthful, then people are going to find things throughout time. And as you said, it’s the pieces. You know what you’re looking for. What you’re looking for is something that’s timely and timeless, and these themes of oppression and scapegoating are very much with us.

What was in my mind when I was in the midst of writing a good chunk of this was the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But it would have been a mistake to make parallels. I was just trying to bring Michael’s book to life, it will have resonance for many years to come, and hopefully the opera will too.