April 23, 2026 On Music The Art of the Libretto: A Conversation with Nilo Cruz By Sophie Haigney Photograph courtesy of Zenith Richards / Met Opera. In May, the opera El último sueño de Frida y Diego will open at the Metropolitan Opera. The opera centers on the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera—but not exactly as themselves. On the Day of the Dead, after Rivera prays for Kahlo’s return, she travels back from the underworld to visit the land of the living. There she finds Rivera, about whom she feels ambivalent; in life, their relationship had been characterized by his infidelity and emotional turmoil. The one rule: she can’t touch anyone, not even him. What happens between them when she exists only in spirit form? And what is it like for one of the great painters of the body to be back in the world without one? This opera explores mortality, pain, and the afterlife of a difficult love. It also manages to be sometimes funny and surprising, with a dynamic cast of other characters, including a feisty keeper of the underworld named Catrina and a young actor named Leonardo, who is enamored with Greta Garbo. Read More
August 11, 2025 On Music Drake, in Search of Lost Time By Benjamin Krusling Image generated by Sora, August 4, 2025. Disappointment has a placid surface—the word is buttoned-up, its gesture to an inner world prioritizing mild description over emotional urgency, an indication simply that what one wished for went left, fell short. Admitting disappointment in others, in circumstances, can be a moment of quiet devastation, but to describe something as “disappointing” is a means of forestalling tears, putting them on the other side of a line. In pop culture, Drake is disappointment’s mouthpiece and its walking embodiment—it’s almost all he talks about and all one seems to hear about his music and persona. At his best, he is disappointment’s major-label poet, if you’re still willing to go there with me now that his utter ubiquity and industrial-strength productivity have, in the last decade, evacuated what remained of those early days of critical respect. Just as disappointment doesn’t often bring more than a few tears to the eye, Drake’s songs don’t, or don’t let themselves, go loudly to that part of the spirit that cries out for something more. Almost every song, always mixed to a streaming-optimized sheen, is a litany of feelings that are ever so slightly bitter, muted, a half Xan’s worth of narcotized. Psychological and calculating but only rarely soulful, just ceaseless solipsism cut sometimes by the urge to seduce or make music for women to dance to, all delivered with the charming evenness of the lounge singer whose chief pleasure is to give you what you came for. Read More
February 21, 2025 On Music How Do You Write an Opera Based on Moby-Dick? By Sophie Haigney Gene Scheer. Photograph by Kate Russell. In early March, a new production of Moby-Dick will open at the Metropolitan Opera. In some ways, Moby-Dick already has everything an opera needs: narrative drama, memorable characters, high stakes, and even the high seas. But to adapt Herman Melville’s classic text—sometimes called the most famous novel no one has ever read—into a three-hour stage production was no small feat. (Remember, after all, all those chapters in the middle about whale anatomy and theology?) Gene Scheer wrote the libretto for Moby-Dick, and composer Jake Heggie wrote the music; it was originally commissioned by the Dallas Opera. It was first performed there in 2010, and has since gone on to audiences in San Francisco, San Diego, Calgary, and elsewhere. We talked to Scheer about the process of adapting Moby-Dick into an opera—and doing the same for Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which comes to the Met in September. We touched on the nuts and bolts of staging whaleships, borrowing from and changing Melville’s language, and the surprising similarities between opera and silent film. INTERVIEWER Were you at all overwhelmed by the prospect of adapting Moby-Dick? GENE SCHEER When the composer, Jake Heggie, said to the Dallas Opera, “We want to do Moby-Dick,” the artistic director Jonathan Pell asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to do?” So, yes. It was a daunting prospect, and it took a long time to figure out a way into it. For the first six months of the process, I just read and reread the book, which I hadn’t done since high school—and back then I probably skipped some chapters. I was also reading criticism about it. I was concerned not just with how to cut it down but also with how to really adapt it for the stage. The nature of Moby-Dick, or any novel, is that it’s telling a story. The narrator is very prominent. In the theater, we’re in the business of showing a story. Rather than what the characters are saying, it’s a question of what they’re doing and how the action can bring life to the story. But I could also see the possibilities immediately for the adaptation. There’s so much about Moby-Dick that is operatic—the language, the themes, and the power of the story. Throughout the book, there are these dramatic, incredibly poetic passages that I could imagine being sung, especially if they were distilled down. And the thing about Moby-Dick is that while it is a very long book and one that’s deep and dense, it does have a very compelling adventure story at the center of it. I knew we could exploit that. Read More
April 24, 2024 On Music The Art of the Libretto: A Conversation with John Adams By Sophie Haigney John Adams. Photograph by Deborah O’Grady. This week, a new production of the composer John Adams’s oratorio El Niño opened at the Metropolitan Opera, where it will run until May 17. El Niño is Adams’ rewriting of the Nativity story, and his libretto—cowritten with stage director Peter Sellars, in one their many collaborations—draws on source texts as wide-ranging the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and Mexican poetry written in the sixties. The text of the libretto reminded me of an assemblage poem as much as an opera. I spoke to Adams, who has composed some of the most notable contemporary operas, among them Nixon in China, for our Art of The Libretto series. We talked over Zoom recently about the joys and pains of collaboration, learning and then setting Spanish text to music, his life as a Californian, and his attempt to write his own Messiah. INTERVIEWER How did El Niño begin for you? JOHN ADAMS I’d been asked by the Châtelet in Paris to create something to celebrate for the millennium. So I began to think about what the millennium was and what was special about the year 2000. It also reminded me that ever since I was a kid, I had always loved Handel’s Messiah, which speaks to that time of year, because it’s also about birth, optimism, and hope. I thought that the millennium as a celebration should have something to do with these emotions. If you want to put it in another way, I wanted to write my own Messiah. Read More
November 1, 2023 On Music The Art of the Libretto: A Conversation with Thulani Davis By Sophie Haigney Courtesy of Thulani Davis. X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X is opening at the Metropolitan Opera on November 3. It originally premiered in 1986 at New York City Opera and is the result of a collaboration between three cousins—Anthony Davis, who wrote the music; Christopher Davis, who wrote the story; and Thulani Davis, who wrote the libretto. I spoke with Thulani Davis on the phone about the niche art of writing a libretto, how she transformed Malcolm X’s speech into arias, and the many American stories that might be operas. INTERVIEWER How did you first approach writing the libretto for X, back in 1981? DAVIS My cousin Anthony Davis asked me to write one, which he would then set to music for an opera. I had never written a libretto, so my first thought was, Oh my God, that’s a lot of poems. My first problem in 1981 was trying to figure out how much I could do in a day, alongside a full-time job. It was a challenging and deep learning experience. But having done a few of them now, I think it’s a better job for a poet than for a playwright. Poets usually don’t write plays, and playwrights don’t usually write in verse, so writing a libretto is a weird little niche. I used to read the librettos in the opera house before they had implemented the idea of putting the words on slides or screens above the stage—I was used to trying not to be heard turning pages at the opera. The only librettos I ever read as a result were in English, and they wouldn’t strike you as poetry. They were not felicitous reading. I wanted X to be more graceful. American English is a rhythmic language. Over time it has become more percussive, and more casual, so there are ways to have fun with it while still writing poetry. Read More
August 30, 2023 On Music Passionate Kisses: The Soundtrack at CVS By Mitch Therieau Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 4.0. I seem to find a reason to go to CVS several times a week. Sometimes these reasons are medical, but much of the time, I am tracking down some household item or another—especially when I need something faster than it can be delivered, or I don’t want to be party to the low-level violence of same-day delivery, and I don’t feel like subjecting myself to the psychic keelhauling of a Target run. There is a unique air of desperation to most CVS locations. This is probably because CVS, as a health-care company stapled to a convenience store chain, blends the special emotional terroirs of the hospital and the gas station snack aisle. It could also be because the stores are often seriously understaffed, presumably in part due to the corporation’s recent move to slash pharmacy hours at thousands of locations. The decor is what you might call austerity-core. It is both corporate-loud (garish displays of next season’s decorations) and minimalist-clinical (pilled gray carpeting, fluorescent lights). People in pain and in search of relief, people picking up the prescriptions they need to live, and people who really want a soda all stalk the aisles. The one unalloyed delight of CVS, though, is the soundtrack. One of the first things you notice once you start paying attention to the in-store music is how much whoever is in charge of programming loves Rod Stewart. “If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, come on, sugar, tell me so,” Rod demands as you ponder the locked cases of flu medicine. “Young hearts, be free tonight,” Rod bellows while you compare the prices of soap. Sometimes he hides behind an additional layer of mediation, as in Sheryl Crow’s version of “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” a song also notably covered by Rod. These are not the sexiest Rod songs. In fact, they are the songs where he sings from a place of impotence or regret. His lover threatens to crush him; she is too impossible to talk to; love will tear them apart. Like the shoppers whose attention the in-store loudspeaker announcements periodically try to seize, she is to be guilted, cajoled. Read More