The tale of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon tells us in his exuberant, cornucopian 2000 novel , “began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the night that Sammy’s mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in the bed for his cousin from Prague.” I can imagine an operatic version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay that would have that same crackle and wit, reproducing the same instant collision of childhood in Brooklyn and tragedy in Mitteleuropa.

That is not, however, Mason Bates’s opera, which opens with a swirl of mist in a stony city and a growl of Death Star brass; I was counting the seconds before a singing S.S. officer clomped onto the stage. Predictability, no

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