Searching for true magic in a broken world, all of us are lost — even Kavalier and Clay

Miles Mykkanen as Sam Clay and Andrzej Filończyk as Joe Kavalier in a scene from “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” Photo by van Zimmerman / Met Opera

By Talya Zax September 27, 2025

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Michael Chabon was arriving at the Metropolitan Opera for the first time in his life. “I imagine I will be completely farblondjet” — Yiddish for lost and disoriented — he texted me, shortly before the premiere of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, an adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name.

Chabon played almost no role in the work’s development, for the simple fact, he said, that he doesn’t know anything about opera. Nor did he have any idea what a big deal a Metropolitan Opera premiere would be, complete with the longtime season-opening ritual of the audience singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” followed by the more specifically 2025 ritual of Sen. Chuck Schumer showing up to speak about ascendant governmental threats to the arts, over a chorus of succinct protests: “So do something about it,” someone yelled from the balcony.

That unintentionally clamorous prologue almost felt like a scene out of Kavalier and Clay, which is shaped by questions about whether art can really change the world, and, if not, what its value is. The opera, like the novel, is deeply progressive, advocating for a broad and openhearted application of the American ideal of liberty and justice for all. But it’s debuting at a time when efforts to suppress art that preaches those values are making those endeavors feel simultaneously more important, and more helpless.

“I find it actually quite difficult to go through the show, thinking about where we are in the world now,” the tenor Miles Mykkanen, who stars as the titular Sam Clay, told me in an interview. Right now, when it comes to the relationship between art and power, we’re all a little farblondjet.

‘The essential story’

An adaptation — any adaptation — of Chabon’s epic about the golden age of comic books, the miserable guilt of refugees who escaped the Holocaust, and the shifting midcentury fortunes of American Jews has been a long time coming. Chabon himself has attempted two, one for film and one for television, only to end up “shaking my fist in anger at the idiot who made” certain structural decisions that made the novel difficult to convert into new media.

“I had to distill it down to the essential story,” Gene Scheer, the opera’s librettist, told me in a phone call. That effort involved cutting legions of secondary characters — farewell to the benign surrealist Longman Harkoo, the hapless American Nazi Carl Ebling, and Orson Welles — and almost a decade from the arc of the narrative.

Kavalier and Clay follows two cousins, the Prague-born artist Josef Kavalier and the scrappy Brooklyn storyteller Sam Klayman — professional name: Clay —as they find wild success in the post-Depression comic book industry, inventing beloved characters like the Houdini-esque Escapist and the ethereal, enchanting Luna Moth, scantily clad savior of lost souls. Then the far-away devastation of the Holocaust reshapes their lives. Eventually, the scourge of post-war McCarthyist censorship does, too.

“This story is so epic and so essentially American,” said composer Mason Bates, who began developing the opera in 2018. Yes, the novel is “sprawling,” he said — a danger for opera, which thrives on plotlines that can be summarized in a neat few sentences — “but it also, in its core, is a simple story of two cousins trying to save their family through art.”

Simple plotlines work in opera, because music provides the unspoken emotional texture behind the often hyperdirect words of the libretto. “You think there’s not a narrator in an opera, but there is: The narrator is the composer,” said Scheer. “He or she is basically creating this sound world correlate for the description and the prose of the author.”

The particular richness of Chabon’s prose is part of why Kavalier and Clay is so beloved. The first time I read the book, at 17, I dog-eared every page that bore a word I didn’t know: “exophthalmic,” “parbuckle,” “slavering.” In a rare authorial trick, Chabon managed to make that language sound not overwrought, but, instead, simply accurate. Could opera preserve that voice?

“How did I use Michael’s language?” said Scheer, “I tried to give Mason the opportunity to make it into music.”

What Bates made, he said, were three separate musical worlds, for the opera’s three settings: wartime Prague, which has a “very string-oriented sound world,” featuring a mandolin inspired in part by the work of Israeli musician Ari Avital; New York City, with “a big band, kind of Tin Pan Alley sound”; and the world of the comic book superheroes, all “electro-acoustic pulsing.” (Bates runs San Francisco raves in his free time.)

Chabon, speaking a few days after the premiere, said he found it difficult to get used to the bluntness of the operatic characters. In writing a novel, he said, you strive for your characters to “express themselves as much, or more, by the things they don’t say, as by the things that they do.” Chabon’s Kavalier would likely never say, in the straightforward manner of his operatic counterpart, that the United States “was meant to be a refuge, a place for the desperate to call home.” Instead, he’d get into fistfights with every Nazi sympathist he could find, as if by doing so he could pummel the U.S. into fulfilling its most sacred vows.

But opera brings a different kind of magic, in exchange. Late in the final act, a dancer portraying Luna Moth flies in on wires. Iridescent wings billow behind her; she is the embodiment of grace, of both the dancerly and saintlike varieties. “I can’t ever represent, on the page, the character of Luna Moth the way they were able to represent her in that moment,” Chabon said. “It was like something that you only ever see in dreams.”

‘You need to see it onstage’

The aspect of Kavalier and Clay most altered by the operatic approach is its treatment of the Holocaust.

In the novel, that disaster is almost entirely unseen. “I made a very conscious choice, partly out of the ever-present danger of verging into what’s sometimes called Holo-kitsch,” to take “Joe Kavalier’s point of view on the fate of his family, which is extremely limited,” Chabon said. “The reader knows way more about the Shoah than Joe does.”

In the opera, the tragedy of Kavalier’s family unfolds onstage. His father and sister race to hide from the Nazis. His mother appears in a striped concentration camp uniform, and sings an aria based on a letter in the book that Kavalier, significantly, never gets to read. Prisoners packed into a cattle car bound for Auschwitz sing a version of “Ani Ma’amin,” a song composed by a prisoner en route to Treblinka.

The decision behind those adjustments was one of theatricality: “In an opera, you need to see it onstage,” Bates said.

But there’s a tradeoff. The presence of all those Nazis, and all those doomed Jews, can make the core story that Bates and Scheer set out to tell — the one about two cousins trying to make their way in the world and ensure the survival of the people they love — feel a bit less real. It raises questions that, in the two times I saw the opera, lifted me briefly out of the narrative.

Why did I care so much more about those cousins, I wondered, than about the terrified chorus on the train tracks? What did it say about me that I found the Nazis to be, basically, the boring part of the plot?

Add to that the sense of duty the opera provokes to think seriously about the glaring contemporary resonances. There’s the LGBTQ+ persecution faced by Clay — a closeted gay man — and a slightly too-on-the-nose reference to the repressive police state instituted by J. Edgar Hoover. And there’s the threat of a new fascism, rising in our own time. “In the middle of Act One, I’m sitting offstage, but I’m watching Kavalier’s father get killed by the Nazis,” Miles Mykannen, who plays Clay, said, “and just reminding myself that, yes, this is an opera, yes, this is all make believe. But history does repeat itself.”

I was reminded of that pre-curtain cry from the balcony: “So do something about it.”

Making ‘something that will be great’

As the final act of Kavalier and Clay opens, Kavalier is in a moral and artistic crisis. He’s learned he’s lost his entire family to the Nazis, even his younger sibling — in the book, a brother; in the opera, a crystalline-voiced sister — whose rescue he thought he’d ensured.

He takes refuge in a warehouse on a Manhattan pier, covering the walls with portraits of the comic book heroes who failed to save his loved ones. Drawing through a grief-fueled mania, he envisions his sister in a confrontation with a sort of ur-Nazi. The guard threatens her, berates her, and mocks her faith in the imaginary saviors that her brother helped create.

Then the Nazi breaks the fourth wall of the fantasy, and turns on Kavalier himself. Look at this nobody, he sings mockingly, “clinging to the myth that art matters.”

So Kavalier does something about it. He enlists to go fight in the war.

At a dress rehearsal three days before opening, the Nazi’s curtain call bow was met with both applause and loud boos. Craig Colclough, the bass-baritone who sings the role, gave the audience a double thumbs-up: He knew his character was getting what he deserved.

On opening night, the reaction was more tentative. When Colclough strode out in his S.S. uniform, complete with swastika armband, the applause subsided, as if the audience had become suddenly uncomfortable with the standing ovation they were in the middle of providing. It almost seemed as if, amid the spectacle, they had briefly forgotten that this opera involved Nazis at all, and they might need to consider how they would personally react to one.

Are you supposed to enjoy a stellar performance of inhumane horror? Is the aspiration to entertain fundamentally at odds with the wish to meaningfully tackle the problems of the world? Is the idea that art matters — not just as a mechanism for creating meaning, but as a practical force that can adjust the course of reality — really a myth?

In the novel, before Kavalier loses everything, he surprises Clay by giving up his fight against the Nazis. “It just makes me have less hope, not more,” he says. Inspired by the artistic revelations of Citizen Kane, he wants to start using comic books to make real art — “something that will be great, you know, instead of trying always to be Good.”

The comic books that follow are the best of Kavalier and Clay’s partnership, a “magical run.” It turns out that readers weren’t really buying the comics for the Nazis, but rather for the feeling the books created. I felt something similar, in the moment when Luna Moth descended from the rafters, restoring wonder to a ravaged onstage world. Good art gives people a sense of possibility, sometimes in the world, but more often in themselves. It had been a beautiful night at the opera, and for a brief glittering moment, all any of us wanted was to be happy.