Peter Mattei's Lincoln Sings Grief: 'Lincoln in the Bardo' Reaches the Met

The Metropolitan Opera has staged "Lincoln in the Bardo," with baritone Peter Mattei singing President Abraham Lincoln — and the production's central image, released by the house, shows him surrounded by the dead.

That single stage picture compresses the whole premise. In George Saunders' 2017 novel, the "bardo" (a Tibetan term for the liminal state between death and rebirth) is a cemetery populated by souls who cannot accept that they have died. Lincoln, in the book as in the opera, visits his son's grave. The dead crowd around him.

The source material for this report is a caption, not a full review: "Peter Mattei as Lincoln, surrounded by the dead in the bardo." Everything below builds on that image and on the production it documents.

Who does what onstage?

Mattei, a Swedish baritone long associated with the Met, takes the title role. The staging places him inside the bardo itself — not observing it from a distance, but standing in the middle of its inhabitants. The dead are not a backdrop. They surround him.

That staging choice matters. Saunders' novel works through a chorus of competing ghost-voices, fragments of testimony that contradict each other. An opera can do something a novel can't: make that chorus literal, and audible, at scale.

What does the adaptation change for the story?

The practical question is whether a book built from textual collage — quotations, historical citations, invented excerpts — can survive translation into sung drama. The production's answer, judging by the released image, is to put bodies where the page had voices. The dead become a physical ensemble around one grieving father.

Lincoln in the novel is a president mid-war who has just lost his son Willie. The opera keeps that hinge: grief and statecraft pressing on the same man at once. Mattei's casting suggests the role sits in the baritone register — the voice type opera traditionally assigns to fathers, rulers and men under strain.

Why this production draws attention

The Met adapting a 21st-century literary novel is itself the headline fact. Saunders' book won the Booker Prize in 2017, its first year of eligibility for the author's debut novel. Bringing a contemporary American novel to the Met's stage continues the company's recent run of new work alongside its standard repertory.

For audiences, the draw is double: a familiar star baritone in an unfamiliar role, and a story whose supernatural premise gives designers and directors unusual room. A graveyard full of the un-dead is not standard Met territory.

What the image confirms is that the production leans into the source's strangeness rather than smoothing it out. Lincoln stands among the dead, and the opera asks us to watch him do it.