On a recent Argentina vacation with his partner and fellow composer John Corigliano, Mark Adamo was finally able to relax and think normally after being obsessed with his opera Lysistrata for the last six years. "I turned to John and I said, 'Gosh, it's so great to be neither catatonic or a maniac.' "
The respite was short-lived. Following the first rehearsals of Lysistrata in Houston, the excitable Adamo became so wound up that he could barely sit still. "The energy coming from the stage could light Manhattan," says the composer in his engaging, rapid-fire manner. "I came back and said, 'OK, I don't sleep normally for the next month.' I'm so totally jazzed about the whole thing, my last two interviewers must have thought I was on amphetamines."
The music world is jazzed as well. After an acclaimed
Houston premiere in 1998, Adamo's first opera, Little Women, quickly became the most popular of contemporary operas. His skillful, user-friendly distillation of Louisa May Alcott's long, episodic novel into an intimate, dramatically effective hour and 40 minutes garnered a recording, a PBS broadcast and a place in the regular repertory, with performances logged at many of the country's opera companies.
Anticipation had been steadily building for the 42-year-old composer's second opera, Lysistrata. In light of political events and international upheaval since Adamo completed his libretto in 1999, this belated premiere has become invested with a ripped-from-the-headlines resonance that he had no way of anticipating seven years ago.
"It's a bittersweet moment for me," says Adamo from New York. "Because, both as a citizen and as an artist, if it were a choice between this piece being less topical and us being at peace, and it being more topical and us being at war, I would happily have picked 'A.' "
Originally slated for a 2002 premiere, the opening was delayed first when the composer missed his deadline, then put on hold again in the wake of the post-9/11 economic freefall. Now, with a controversial war and unstable international situation continuing to rage, Adamo's free adaptation of Aristophanes's antiwar comedy seems more relevant than he could have ever dreamed.
Yet Adamo was not aiming to utilize the play as a pamphleteering allegory. Rather, he wanted to create more complex characters and explore different sides of the debate. "Aristophanes was really trying to change his audience's minds," Adamo said. "He was not really interested in human ambiguity. And as a dramatist, I am.
"At the moment when it seems that even our most responsible mass media are trying to polarize us into this nightmare of red and blue, I am trying to do a 'purple' piece — in the sense of trying to come to some shaded ground where we can have more sympathy for people with whom we ordinarily disagree."
In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the subsequent war in Iraq, and tectonic shift in the national landscape and political attitudes, Adamo put off returning to his opera. "After the planes fell, there was a while when I really didn't want to look at the libretto again," he said. "I knew I had to work as hard as I could to make it germane, but now here we are (in the middle of a war) and how is it going to read?"
Much to his relief, Adamo found that his libretto still worked as originally conceived, and he didn't have to change a word. "I've cut it for time as always, but for content or matter, not in the least."
Though mindful of the parallel background of a war
dragging on with no end in sight, Adamo found his greatest challenge was coming
to grips with his source material. Set in the 21st year of the Peloponnesian
War, Aristophanes's comedy relates the tale of Lysistrata (or Lysia, depending
on the translation), who persuades the women of Athens and Sparta to withhold
sexual favors from their husbands and lovers until the men stop their incessant
military campaigning. Historically Lysistrata is a work more known and respected than actually performed. Invariably, it is trotted out as a kind of handy, obligatory form of artistic dissent at times of unpopular wars.
Adamo thinks that the work's reputation owes more to its intriguing premise and the modern feminist resonance of its battle-of-the-sexes theme than the actual dramatic execution or inherent narrative freight.
"People expect it to be psychologically provocative in a way that The Taming of the Shrew is. It's not a character piece the way Medea is, yet it's remembered that way." Adamo likens the original to a political sketch or nightclub satirical piece. "It's written out of a sense of political urgency," he said. "It's not interested in a broader canvas. It's the difference between an oil portrait and an editorial-page cartoon."
With its outdoor swagger and externalized conflict, Lysistrata posed a stylistic 180-degree turn from the intimate household drama of Little Women. For Adamo, the fact that it offered an opposite challenge was one of the main attractions.
"Little Women was all psychology and no structure," said Adamo. "And this is all situation and no psychology. Also after doing this kind of naturalistic, adolescent sweet piece, I wanted to do something that was all bright colors with fully sexualized adults, and much more political."
For Adamo, it also required a substantially different musical approach. Whereas Little Women was imbued with a gentle nostalgia and lyricism, Lysistrata is a faster and punchier opera, more contrapuntal with more ensemble scenes.
"It's rhythmically driven in a way that Little Women really isn't," said Adamo. "It's much more polytonal. There's a strutting, exhibitionistic quality to the music that obviously would have been all wrong for the first piece."
Adamo has taken a very free hand with his libretto, substantially refashioning Aristophanes's characters and scenario to fit his conception of the work.
"I love the Utopian yearning of the original play but I can't quite believe it," says Adamo. "The idea that if a bunch of spunky women get together suddenly we're going to solve all problems of human conflict both domestic and political ... I would love that to be true. But if you don't believe that to be true, then you have to ask 'what do you believe?' And that can you lead you into some rather disconsolate territory."
Despite the comedy and broad bawdy style — the opera's subtitle is "The Nude Goddess" — it's far from an unalloyed farce. "Some of the saddest music I've ever written is in Act II of this piece," Adamo said. "Which is why I'm really grateful that there is a lot of farce and counterpoint and high spirits leading up to it," he added. "Because otherwise you wouldn't be able to watch it."
A friend, librettist William Hoffman, has termed Adamo's new opera "a tragedy in the form of a farce," which Adamo thinks is a fair assessment. The composer promises his version will also jar audience members with a "surprise ending" of sorts. "If I've done my work correctly, then there should be one moment near the end of the show where you think I as a writer have completely lost control of the material!"
In Adamo's reworking the title character is not the fully formed, politically conscious woman, but a "languid aristocrat," with no interest in affairs of state. Kleonike, who in the original is her bibulous sidekick, is now the political conscience. The Athenian general Nico, Lysia's lover, has also become more complex, rather than a cardboard archetype.
In the opera, Lysistrata is drawn into the political situation instead of creating it. "At the end of the day she's faced with the question, to whom do I belong: to myself or to my people? Is my personal happiness enough or do I owe something to the community to which I belong?"
The wonderful thing about opera, Adamo said, is that "it's rich and inclusive. You're working with a 110-color palette. You have all the resources of drama, all the resources of music, all of that.
"The bad news is that no matter how much you throw at opera, it can always take more," he said with a laugh. "But if you have a big conception, this is the form that you want."
Mark Adamo's Lysistrata — The Nude
Goddess
has its world premiere run from 4–19 March 2005 at Houston Grand Opera (www.houstongrandopera.org)
