About the work
“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” is an opera by Mason Bates to a libretto by Gene Scheer, based on Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. It follows the Jewish cousins Joe Kavalier, who escapes Nazi-occupied Prague for New York in 1939, and Brooklyn-born Sam Clay. Together they invent an anti-fascist superhero, the Escapist, and launch their own comic-book series, hoping to recruit America into the fight against Nazism. The libretto moves between three worlds: 1930s Prague, 1940s New York and the technicolour realm of comic-book fantasy. Bates blends the orchestra with electronic sounds in a score that often evokes 1940s Hollywood film. Commissioned by the Met, the opera premiered in November 2024 at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music and, substantially revised, opened the Metropolitan Opera's 2025–26 season on 21 September 2025 in a production by Bartlett Sher conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin.