(Credit: Ricardo Beas)

When composer Missy Mazzoli went into a meeting with Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb, she hoped for a commission and had one idea to offer: a huge graveyard full of ghosts, built around Abraham Lincoln’s grief. That idea became “Lincoln in the Bardo,” adapted from George Saunders’ novel, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, with whom she had collaborated on a half-dozen operas.

Vavrek was born in Grande Prairie, Alberta, and studied filmmaking at Concordia University before earning a master’s degree in musical theater writing from New York University. He then entered American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program, which established his career as an opera librettist. “Angel’s Bone,” his opera with composer Du Yun, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music. His other works include “Breaking the Waves,” “Proving Up,” “The Listeners” and “The Galloping Cure” with Mazzoli, as well as “JFK” with David T. Little. He also runs Against the Grain Theatre in Toronto.

OperaWire recently spoke to Vavrek, who discussed the Met premiere, the craft of adapting longer works for opera, and the themes that connect his body of work.

OperaWire: “Lincoln in the Bardo” at the Metropolitan Opera. How does it feel to see one of your works get its big premiere at one of the world’s most renowned opera houses? Dream come true?

Royce Vavrek: It’s quite insane. Missy and I get to make our art with some of the most brilliant people in the world, on this massive stage, and we get to tell this crazy story. Dream come true, to say the least!

OW: Tell me where the project started.

RV: Missy was called in for a meeting with Peter Gelb, and she was hopeful that he would offer her a commission. She called me the night before and asked me what I thought she should pitch for us to write. Knowing that George Saunders is her favorite writer, and this being shortly after “Lincoln in the Bardo” had been published, I told her that if given the opportunity to create something specifically for the Met, we should do something huge: like a huge graveyard full of ghosts, like Abraham Lincoln’s heavy grief. I believe it was the only idea she offered at that meeting!

OW: You are not new to adapting established works into operas. Almost all of your collaborations with Missy are adaptations of a novel, film, real-life story, or short story. And that doesn’t include all of the other libretti you have created. Opera is a singular artform where music dictates time; consequently, dramatic space often needs to be compressed to allow music time to develop. What is the key to adapting longer art forms for opera?

RV: Boiling something down to its emotional essence. Then finding the right amount of poetry to inspire the composer.

OW: How does your approach to adaptation differ from when you are working on a wholly original story?

RV: The only thing different when writing an opera that is wholly original is that it necessitates an extra (first) step: figuring out the story! In theory, it should mean that it takes longer, but sometimes my imagination goes wild when you don’t have source material you are beholden to, and the work tumbles out of me quickly.

I love adapting movies because they were one of my first loves. Cinema was a window to the world for me when I was a boy growing up on a grain farm in northern Alberta, Canada. My storytelling, which was fostered by my high school drama teacher Paulette Long, was greatly inspired by the auteurist international cinema I could rent from my local video store. It is where I discovered Lars von Trier, Atom Egoyan, Alexander Payne, and so many others who are all heroes of mine and who have informed the way I approach my own storytelling.

OW: When approaching “Lincoln in the Bardo,” what were some of the major decisions you made in adapting it into an opera? What were essential choices made to keep the essence of the original work? What did you choose to change to suit opera?

RV: I wanted to make sure that everything was in the service of Willie and Abraham’s journey, and I knew that we weren’t going to be able to have 166 characters on stage (as many as are the attributions in George’s book), so that meant focusing on Bevins, Vollman, and The Reverend as our core trio of ghosts, and then folding in as much information and character as we could in the relatively short real estate we have in operatic prose. I knew Miss Traynor had to be there, as did Thomas Havens, Mrs. Hodge and Litzie (the latter an addition to the libretto, following a suggestion from George). The Barons were way too delicious to leave out — I’ve always thought of them as our version of the Thénardiers in Les Misérables.

I think this is a very faithful adaptation of George’s novel. And it feels operatic when you read it. George has said that he long dreamed of it finding an operatic context. It was my job to identify the soul of the story and then figure out how to represent that in as few carefully chosen words as possible.

OW: You’ve worked on six operas with Missy to date. How did your collaboration begin? How do you complement one another and what excites you most about working with Missy? What is your process like when working with her?

RV: Missy is a remarkable musical dramatist. She’s a ferociously imaginative composer. And she’s my best friend!

We met in 2009 at Carnegie Hall, where Missy had come to support David T. Little, when we were presenting the first 20-or-so minutes of “Dog Days.” That afternoon, she handed me a flyer for a similar showcase of excerpts of her opera “Song from the Uproar,” which she would later ask me to help her complete!

We’ve basically grown up together in the opera industry, and with the help of leaders like Beth Morrison, Francesca Zambello, David Devan, Annilese Miskimmon, John Berry, and Peter Gelb, we’ve been given the tools to become the artists we are today, on the eve of presenting the biggest work of our careers. We are a product of their support and belief in us.

I also should mention that my early training at American Lyric Theater, through their Composer Librettist Development Program, really set me up for success. I am indebted forever to Lawrence Edelson.

OW: Looking at your body of work, are there themes or ideas that you feel are consistent throughlines? If any, do you choose these consciously or do you not approach your work in this way?

RV: I certainly have themes, artists, storytellers, etc. that I seem to want to engage with multiple times. I run a Canadian opera company in Toronto, Against the Grain, and am focusing quite intensely on Canadian stories and Canadian writers and performers. I’m developing an opera based on “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert W. Service with the composer Matthew Ricketts and have been noodling an operatic adaptation of “Anne of Green Gables” with Luna Pearl Woolf. Iconic Canadian stories that haven’t yet been given operatic consideration.

I love my Scandinavian filmmakers (part of my family’s heritage), and have been lucky to adapt the work of von Trier and Ingmar Bergman, hopefully with more names to add to that list soon.

“Lincoln in the Bardo” is my second opera about an American president, after “JFK” with David T. Little.

I am always eager to contribute queer works to the repertoire. You’ll find Grover, the gay best friend (who happens to be a stuffed prairie dog), in my opera “The Wild Beast of the Bungalow” with Rachel J. Peters; the love story of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in “27” with Ricky Ian Gordon; three generations of queer characters inspired by Ellen DeGeneres’s act of bravery in “The Puppy Episode” with Matthew Recio; the teenage boy pining after his internet lover in “A Song for Wade (This is Not That Song)” with the late Matt Marks; and now Bevins in “Lincoln in the Bardo.”

There’s also a running joke (that sadly doesn’t extend to “Lincoln in the Bardo”) that many Royce Vavrek librettos call for a bathtub. “JFK,” “Angel’s Bone” with Du Yun, “Midwestern Gothic” with Josh Schmidt, “Melancholia” with Mikael Karlsson, “Silent Light” with Paola Prestini, and “Proving Up” with Missy Mazzoli are all examples of this.

I also love writing for many of the voices that have inspired me during these first two chapters of my career. Beautiful humans like Lauren Worsham, Lauren Snouffer, Amelia Watkins, Susan Bullock, Anne Sofie von Otter, Daniela Mack, Thomas Hampson, Marnie Breckenridge, Peter Tantsits, Rihab Chaieb, Eve Gigliotti, Stephanie Blythe, Daniel Okulitch, John Moore, Talise Trevigne, Abigail Fischer, and so many, many more who have done multiple shows with me. They are the superstars who make me and my collaborators look good!