Lincoln in the Bardo

Why it is worth going

This is the first staging anywhere of a Met commission, shared with The Santa Fe Opera: Missy Mazzoli's score to a libretto by Royce Vavrek, her partner on five earlier operas, after the novel that won George Saunders the 2017 Booker Prize.¹ Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts seven of the nine performances; Steven Osgood takes 31 October and 14 November 2026.¹ Peter Mattei sings Lincoln, whose visits to the tomb of his eleven-year-old son Willie keep the boy's spirit in the bardo, the state between one life and the next.¹ Mazzoli writes against type: the dramatic soprano Christine Goerke sings the male Reverend and the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo the girl Miss Elise Traynor, with Stephanie Blythe as Mrs. Baron, and the score calls up Handel's Semele, Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles and Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle.¹ Lileana Blain-Cruz directs a new production with puppets and creature suits by James Ortiz and illusions by Jeremy Chernick.¹

It is sung in English, with Met Titles in English, German and Spanish, and runs 2 hours 40 minutes: an 85-minute first act, a 30-minute intermission, then 45 minutes.¹ Latecomers wait for the intermission, so a late arrival misses more than half the music.²¹ The Met suggests it for ages 13 and up: it deals with suicide, and the staging uses haze and pyrotechnics.¹

The opening on 19 October 2026 is the World Premiere Gala, black tie: cocktails at 6 PM, dinner on the Grand Tier at 6:30 PM, the curtain at 8 PM, champagne and dessert in the intermission.³ Every gala level with dinner is sold out with a waitlist; seats for the performance alone are USD 1,000, by telephone on +1 212 362 6000.³ For the other nights, sales are final: there are no refunds, but a ticket bought from the Met can be exchanged free into a later performance of the same season up to curtain time, paying any difference.² Customer Care answers on the same number from 10 AM to curtain on performance days, Monday to Saturday.⁴