Kavalier and Clay Come to the Met
Composer Mason Bates Not Well Served
By: Susan Hall - Sep 26, 2025
If you listened carefully to a panel discussion at the Guggenheim Museum a few weeks before the opera by Mason Bates, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, opened you could hear the problems that staging this work was going to face at the Metropolitan Opera.
Mason Bates, one of the most gifted modern composers, sat looking bewildered, sad, an outsider. Bates is the composer. He is supposed to be the driving force of his opera. He has been cast aside.
Peter Gelb, general manager of the Met, talked about seeing Bates’ first opera on Steve Jobs in Santa Fe and telling Bates that he would like to produce a work of his at the Met. Was there something Bates wanted to do?
Bates was reading Kavalier and Clay at the time and lofted the title.
I love the book. Everyone I know loves the book. It is difficult to stage as an opera.
One way to look at it is to focus on the punch delivered to Hitler’s jaw—an act of revenge. It is a powerful symbol of the fight back against the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Well before 1933, and until his dying day, over 200 unsuccessful attempts were made on Hitler’s life.
The cartoon creators are trying to make money to bring their relatives left in Europe over to the U.S.. This punch has a real satisfaction to it.
Why not make it the central event of the opera?
Well, look at the team Gelb assembled.
Bartlett Sher is a distinguished director of theater. But opera is not theater. It is a story driven by music. The composer should be in charge.
The librettist, who also did Moby-Dick, Gene Scheer, somehow missed the opportunity offered by the book. Like his treatment of Moby-Dick, too much literary material is included. Moby-Dick is a bore. The composer just got Musical America’s Composer of the Year. He is easy on the ear.
When these young hotshot composers hit the Met, they are not used. Instead, they are directed by people who make Gelb comfortable and are counted on to get something up on stage which may be flashy, but often doesn’t tell a story.
Bates spent three years in Chicago as a composer in residence under Riccardo Muti. They obviously got along. Remember that after Muti’s one excursion conducting for Gelb he said he would never return.
Kavalier and Clay is flashy. That’s it. Mason Bates was not used. He was not served well by this Met team. And if you heard his Anthology of Fantatic Zoology dedicated to Muti performed at Carnegie Hall, you would know how talented he is.
Other young Turks have not done well at the Met. Nico Muhly, whose wonderful Dark Sisters preceded his Met excursion; and Kevin Puts, who was always given librettists who used too many words; and now Bates..
Who knows what Gelb will do with the new infusion of cash from Saudi Arabia. New York’s mayor, the future ambassador to Saudi Arabia, will be primed to help him.
Mason Bates is a wonderful composer. Was he allowed to breathe through the production process at the Met?
Note: At a discussion at the Park Avenue Synagogue, Mr. Bates said he was disaapoint4d that he had not been asked to be more involved in the production of his opera.