The Associated Press, as carried by ABC News and The Killeen Daily Herald, reports that composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek have adapted George Saunders' Booker Prize-winning novel into an opera receiving its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, opening October 19 with Met music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducting and a run of nine performances.

The setting is Georgetown's Oakhill Cemetery, populated almost entirely by ghosts who refuse to accept their deaths, while Abraham Lincoln — alive but paralyzed by grief over his 11-year-old son Willie, a typhoid fever victim — cradles the boy's body in a late-night crypt visit.

By the opera's end, Willie accepts he is dead and Lincoln leaves ready to guide the nation through the Civil War.

For a story set among the dead, the tone described by the creators is startlingly light.

Librettist Royce Vavrek told the Associated Press the work is 'effervescent, quite hilarious at times,' with heartbreak and joy alongside each other, and director Lileana Blain-Cruz said the opera 'honors that life is not all doom and gloom.'

The ghosts call their coffins 'sick-boxes,' and those who accept their fate vanish in a fireworks explosion Saunders dubbed 'matterlightblooming.'

Mazzoli's score even opens its prologue with the chorus blowing kazoos — a choice she explained to the AP as an interest in 'non-virtuosic instruments in virtuosic settings,' juxtaposed with skillful singing at the Met.

Among the vocal highlights is unusual, gender-switched casting: baritone Peter Mattei stars as Lincoln, dramatic soprano Christine Goerke sings the Reverend, and counter-tenor Anthony Roth Costanzo takes Miss Elise Traynor.

Goerke, one of her generation's leading Wagner and Strauss sopranos, told the Associated Press she had 'waited my whole life to have a role written for me,' calling it 'the most meaty, spectacular role.'

She said the part spans her full range — from high C down two octaves — and is dramatically demanding, since the Reverend alone among the ghosts knows he is dead yet resists his fate over a vision of eternal damnation before a heroic, possibly redeeming sacrifice.

Mazzoli told the AP that the hardest part of composing the score was the death of a child, describing years spent 'alone with these characters' and the difficulty of inhabiting the boy's mindset daily.

Her solution was to focus on the ending, when Willie realizes death frees him from earthly constraints in an aria where he sings 'all is allowed me now' — he can fly out the window, hang from the chandelier, drink rum.

She said she had to find a positive slant so she would not be crushed by the sadder parts of the story.

The production is a significant marker for singers and contemporary opera.

This is the sixth collaboration between Vavrek and Mazzoli, close on the heels of 'The Galloping Cure,' which earned rave reviews in Edinburgh and gets a U.S. premiere in San Francisco next season, according to the Associated Press.

Met general manager Peter Gelb promised more Mazzoli at the Met in years to come, and Blain-Cruz's staging piles on spectacle — pyrotechnics, puppetry, and a black mustang named Zeus carrying a Lincolnesque figure back toward the White House at the final curtain — suggesting the Met is betting audiences will embrace brand-new vocal writing at scale.

Saunders' 'Lincoln' is not finished after the premiere. The Associated Press reports he has written the screenplay for a feature film version directed by Duke Johnson that combines live action and stop motion, with Tom Hanks set to star in the title role.

Whether the kazoo prologue and pyrotechnic 'matterlightblooming' moments win over Met audiences should become clear once the nine-performance run begins on October 19.