“The Book Really Wanted to Sing All Along”

In Tibetan, the word bardo means “gap.” It is also a Buddhist term for the transitional state between death and reincarnation. In the award-winning 2017 novel by George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo, that gap is occupied by characters who neither accept nor acknowledge that they are dead. Instead, they await a “recovery” that will return them to their former lives. This coming Monday, the Metropolitan Opera is presenting the world premiere of Lincoln in the Bardo—music by Missy Mazzoli and libretto by Royce Vavrek. The opera illustrates the journey of its protagonists toward the truth of their deaths.

The Lincoln of the title is not Abraham or Mary Todd but their third son, Willie, dead at 11 from typhoid fever and brought to the Oak Hill Cemetery, in Washington, D.C., for entombment. Willie is unwilling to accept his own death and will not be transported to heaven until his father releases him, which Abraham is loath to do. Both in the opera and by contemporary accounts, Abraham entered his son’s crypt and had the casket opened on multiple occasions in the days after Willie died. Whether he hugged and cradled the corpse as he does in the book and in the opera—and was rumored to have done in his lifetime—can never be known.