By John Ardoin
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| The March house. |
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Librettist-composer
Mark Adamo has described Louisa May Alcott's classic tale LITTLE
WOMEN as an "indispensable chronicle of growing up female in post-Civil War New England," and a "main dish in the smorgasbord of American popular fiction. Readers have devoured the adventures of Meg, Jo, Beth, and
Amy in more than 100 languages. In our own land and tongue, Hollywood
has had to film the piece once every 20 years or so to slake
the recurring appetite [for it]."
Adamo fell in love with the book after reading it as a child,
and later came to believe in its potential as an operatic work.
"The novel itself -- part-classic, part mass-culture perennial --
as well as its young, lively characters set in an antique locale
reminded me of opera itself today: an art buzzing with new writing
and thinking while still working with resources ... that stabilized
100 years ago." For Adamo, it was not solely a story of "the romance
of a free-spirited young writer torn between the boy next door and
a man of the world," which was how the novel had been commonly
presented in erstwhile stage and screen adaptations.
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| Jo and Meg. |
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A deeper meaning was
manifest in the nature of the familial relationship: "those we love
will, in all innocence, wound and abandon us until we learn that
their destinies are not ours to control." In his composer's notes, Adamo states that "the conflict of LITTLE WOMEN is Jo versus the passage of time. ... Alone among protagonists
in classic American fiction (Tom Sawyer, Holden Caulfield, Portnoy),
she's happy where she is. Adored by her family, she adores them
in turn. ... Jo knows that adulthood will only graduate her from
her perfect home. She fights her own and her sisters' growth because
she knows deep down that growing up means growing apart."
With these
factors in mind, Adamo fashioned an opera from Alcott's book by
cutting and shaping the libretto so that it adhered more closely
to the original story, with Jo's love for her sisters remaining
a powerful force within the piece. As for the score, the overarching
principle was "that even the most disparate materials can (and should)
belong together if the dramatic design is sound." From Mark Adamo's composer's statement:
[The score's] materials reflect my love of "fioratura"
vocal writing, pan-chromatic harmony, and American theater-song
forms. I [created] two main motives ... as well as themes for
all the characters and ceratin dramatic actions ... But the motives
themselves neither narrate the story nor comment on it in [a]
Wagnerian manner. [Instead] they drive in the script what the
renowned acting teacher Uta Hagen calls acting "beats" -- specific
psychological actions, closely (or barely at all) matched to the
actual stage gestures, that track the progress of the characters
as much if not more than do the events of the story. I wanted
these mostly tonal themes to appear and intertwine as audibly
as I could make them as the opera unfolded -- perhaps against
an orchestral background utterly distinct in texture, harmony,
and line from the thematic foreground.
So for those scenes driven by language and story, rather than
music and psychology, I concocted a variant of 18th-century recitative
... crisply minimal, but made from a twelve-tone melody ... that
not only spiked the harmonies under the non-thematic dialogue,
but also gave Jo the makings of her wild storytelling ... sections
in her Act I scena, "Perfect As We Are." [An explanation of twelve-tone writing is
available at: http://encarta.msn.com/.]
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| Jo at Beth's bedside. |
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"Little Women" was
originally commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera as a vehicle
for its Studio for training young singers. But so successful were
the Studio performances that the opera returned to the stage in Houston last year as part of the company's regular season, and it
was during these performances in the spring of 2000 that "Little
Women" was taped for GREAT PERFORMANCES. Following the Studio premiere,
a new production of the work was mounted by the Civic Opera Theater
of Kansas City, and in 2001 performances are scheduled by Opera
Pacific, Colorado's Central City Opera, and Michigan's Opera Grand
Rapids, while 2002 will bring performances by the Glimmerglass Opera.
All in all, a remarkable achievement for not only a first opera,
but one that is only two years old.
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