By Adam Nagourney
The New York Times (International edition) · 2025-09-13
Mason Bates’s spacious studio, just a few steps from his home near San Francisco, has a Steinway piano, a set of turntables and a row of guitars hanging on the back wall. But for the musical point he wanted to demonstrate on this bright California afternoon, Bates needed a synthesizer. He flicked a switch on his Prophet Sequential and a trembling bass filled the room.
“We are making the superhero world,” he said. “I felt like we needed the electronics.”
Bates, 48, was talking about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, his Metropolitan Opera debut. On Sept. 21 it becomes only the third new work the Met has premiered at the season’s opening night in the last 10 years. Michael Chabon’s sprawling 2000 novel follows two Jewish cousins in Nazi-occupied Prague, then to New York as the Nazi occupiers close in. The opera is about, in essence, creating a comic superhero that helps them resist.
Bates said: “Something that is beyond metaphor, fantasy, far away … but with background in sound design and D.J.ing became pretty useful.”
Bates is a composer whose music has been performed at symphony halls and opera houses all over the country. One of his operas (Steve Jobs) premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 2017. He was the first composer in residence at the Kennedy Center in Washington. He is also a D.J., who plays bass-thumping techno music in crowded dance floors across San Francisco, under the name D.J. Masonic.
Never before has electronic music featured so prominently at the Met. “I have written into some movements,” Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin said, describing the score’s mix of electronic and acoustic orchestration. “It just fits. I am not in charge at the moment. I just listen.” He added, “It’s a challenge.” But he said the Met has been doing new works regularly. “For the past five years, this kind of project — undertaking this kind of repertoire — is not surprising.”
In explaining how Kavalier and Clay was chosen, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said: “Yannick and I are very determined to make new works a centerpiece of the Met.” For example, at least four of the five operas that have opened the Met season since Covid have been new works (Medea in fall 2022 was the only exception). Gelb said Kavalier “represents the kind of American composer interested in what opera should have been doing with new music for a long time but hasn’t.”
The novel’s more than 600 pages, covering 25 years, have been squeezed by Bates and the librettist, Gene Scheer, into a relatively brisk two-and-a-half-hour opera. Its two acts are staged in Nazi-occupied Prague, New York City in the 1940s, and an imaginary comic book universe that is revealed in animation on screens behind the singers, who include the baritone Andrzej Filonczyk as Joe and tenor Miles Mykkanen as Sam.
“It moves like Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Bates said. “It’s like boom, boom, boom. Nazis. Superheroes.”
The opera has been nearly eight years in the making. When Gelb saw the Jobs opera in Santa Fe, Bates learned he was in the audience and sent him a note saying he was interested in writing for the Met. Gelb invited him to New York. When Gelb asked him for ideas, Bates suggested Kavalier and Clay — “all the ingredients for a great opera.” He had already tracked down Chabon to get permission to adapt the novel. Chabon granted the rights but has had little involvement in the opera.
Kavalier was supposed to premiere at Los Angeles Opera as a joint production with the Met, but Los Angeles backed out, citing cost and complexity. Instead, it premiered last year with a student cast at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington, with a stage nearly as large as the Met’s.
Scheer said adapting a novel with so many story zigs and zags was daunting: “We had to cut an enormous amount and reimagine it in a way that would invite music in. That’s the trick: to distill the story.”
The fast-paced shifts in the story are signaled by set changes and music. To convey Prague, Bates uses “an older school world of strings and mandolin — almost a folksy sound.” For New York in the 1940s, including a party at Salvador Dalí’s Greenwich Village home, Bates drew on swing-era big band music his father played.
And of course, electronica. “Most of it feels experimental but not really successful,” Nézet-Séguin said. “In Mason’s case, it’s perfectly integrated.”
Bates played synthesizer in the orchestra pit in Santa Fe for the Jobs opera. For Kavalier, the synth tracks are prerecorded: “It’s easier to record it in my studio and master it,” he said. “I’ve had to design software to make this stuff work with a live orchestra.”
Though the story takes place 75 years ago, director Bartlett Sher said it feels topical: “It’s about fascism and the power of art to help us understand the world.”
Bates immersed himself in Jewish culture and music while preparing, even attending services at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco. For the opera, he tracked down the song “Ani Ma’amin” (I Believe), sung by prisoners in a Nazi death camp. It was previewed earlier this year at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, an L.G.B.T.Q. synagogue in New York. The Met has targeted Jewish and L.G.B.T.Q. audiences to build interest in Kavalier.
The question now is whether audiences will embrace a composer who counts not only Wagner, Verdi, and Berlioz, but also D.J.s like Deadmau5, Carl Craig, and Mouse on Mars, among his influences.
“It makes some people very uncomfortable,” said Michael Christie, who conducted the Indiana student premiere. “Personally, I think it’s great when it’s all locked in. This is a part of Mason’s palette that’s been with him for decades.”
Gelb added: “For a long period of time, composers were not writing operas for the public but writing for themselves. That produced elite, cerebral music that left audiences cold. Mason is an example of a composer who understands both intellectually and emotionally, and achieves that.”