Lincoln in the Bardo

On February 25, 1862, Abraham Lincoln visited Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown to sit alone with the body of his eleven-year-old son Willie, who had died three days earlier of typhoid fever. George Saunders's 2017 Booker Prize-winning novel imagined what the dead surrounding the boy might have witnessed: a president who could not leave his child's crypt, unable to understand why. Missy Mazzoli's world premiere opera — co-commissioned by the Met and the Los Angeles Opera — brings her singular harmonic imagination to this material. Mazzoli is among the most important American opera composers working today, and Lincoln in the Bardo is her largest and most ambitious work to date. Conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, with baritone Peter Mattei as Lincoln.