Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Music

Michael Chabon’s ‘Kavalier & Clay’ May Become An Opera At The Met

Move over, “Ring Cycle,” there’s a new opera epic in the works. Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (2000) may be making its way to the Metropolitan Opera.

The New York Times reports that the Met is busy commissioning original operas with an eye toward including the work of more women and adapting modern literary works. As part of that effort, an adaptation of Chabon’s novel is reportedly in development with American composer Mason Bates.

Chabon’s book, which covers three decades in the lives of the fictional comic book pioneer cousins Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier, is already operatic in scope. Featuring a golem, a cast of characters that includes Salvador Dalí and vividly-imagined Golden Age superheroes like the Houdini-inspired Escapist, the scale of the book would fit comfortably in the Met’s massive opera house.

According to The Times, Missy Mazzoli is among the composers working on new commissions for the Met; she is tasked with adapting George Saunders’s first novel, the Man Booker Prize-winning “Lincoln in the Bardo.” The Met is also planning to stage Janine Tesori’s opera, “Grounded” based on George Brandt’s play of the same name, and an adaptation of Lynn Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel” by Nottage and composer Ricky Ian Gordon.

PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture intern. He can be reached at grisar@forward.com

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.