Opera Synopsis Prologue: The attic of the March house, Concord, Massachusetts, about 1870.   Jo March alone in her family's attic. Jo (Stephanie Novacek), 21 but feeling older, looks through her old trunk until her childhood friend (and one-time, would-be suitor) Laurie (Chad Shelton) appears in the attic doorway. Delighted, but uneasy -- Laurie has just returned from Paris, where he has married Jo's younger sister, Amy -- Jo presses him: he hasn't just married Amy to remain close to Jo, has he? Worse, in loving Amy, Laurie has fallen quite out of love with Jo: can she forgive him? Jo claims relief and good cheer, but Laurie, oblivious and exultant, proposes a return to their easy rapport of years ago. Wasn't their relationship "perfect as it was"? The phrase maddens Jo. She mocks the very idea of trying to stop time from changing the ones she loves, and the opera spirals back in time to show us what she means. Act I Scene One: The attic, two years earlier.   March sisters playing games in the attic. Jo and her three sisters -- distracted Meg (Joyce DiDonato), ethereal Beth (Stacey Tappan), and peppery Amy (Margaret Lloyd) -- bicker and shout as they make a clubhouse of the attic and games of their household chores. Inducting Laurie as an honorary member of "The Barristers Club," they launch a game of Truth or Fabrication while sorting and folding their laundry. The game reveals that Meg's lost glove may actually be part of some deeper secret: that Amy's taunting of Laurie is anything but hostile; that Jo's devotion to her sisters far outweighs her ambitions for her own writing or the very thought of a husband; and that Beth's calm good humor hardens into brittleness at the merest suggestion that her health is unsound. Alma (Gwendolyn Jones), the girls' mother, summons them to supper. As they go, the close harmony of their last club-song strophe ("Long may our comrades prosper well") seems to affirm their intimacy. Laurie, lingering, taunts Jo with the knowledge of where Meg's glove is: his tutor, John Brooke, keeps it as a talisman of his love for the older girl, a love which she may indeed return. Jo, curiously intense, scoffs at the notion that her sister and confidante would "go filling her head with lover-ing rubbish." Laurie, equally intense, reminds her, "Things change," before leaving her alone. Jo, disturbed, starts to rewrite her latest fictional melodrama, but can't shake Laurie's hint that Meg might soon be leaving the family. As she edits "The Curse of the Coventries," Jo argues with an absent Laurie that, Brooke or no Brooke, she and her sisters remain "Perfect as we are." Scene Two: The path in front of the March house.   Meg March with her suitor, Mr. Brooke. John Brooke (Daniel Belcher) walks Meg home in the October twilight. Meg offers to teach him Rigamarole, a storytelling game, while Jo acts out "The Curse of the Coventries" for an approving Laurie. John's Rigamarole story ("There was a knight, once") is so clearly modeled on his own feelings for Meg that Laurie, overhearing, exults. An appalled Jo bursts in and all but chases John off, hounding Meg with protests as they retreat into the house. Inside, an oblivious Beth, at her piano, rewrites her musical setting of verses from "The Pilgrim's Progress" ("She who is down need fear no fall"), while Alma and her husband Gideon (James Maddalena) argue over finances, and Amy sketches a portrait. Jo marshals the entire family to plead with Meg to reject John. Meg convinces Jo that rejecting John was her plan all along. No sooner has she given her word than John, arriving unannounced, overwhelms Meg with a bluntly ardent proposal. Jo, hidden in the parlor, hisses discouragement, when Cecilia March (Katherine Ciesinski), the girls' arch aunt, sweeps in. Scorning John's profession and suspecting his motives, Cecilia only hardens Meg's resolve. To her own surprise, Meg pledges herself to John. The family congratulates the new couple; Jo is devastated. Desperate, Jo accuses Meg of abandoning her. Meg appeases Jo as best she can, but her billowing confession of love for John only wounds Jo more deeply. An implacable Jo withholds forgiveness; Meg, equally implacable, leaves Jo to her anger. Jo seeks comfort with a sympathetic Beth as an October snow begins to fall. Laurie, wordless, tries to console Jo: she shrugs him off. Amy shows Laurie her finished portrait, about which he says exactly the wrong thing. Scene Three: The March house, the summer of the following year.   Alma and Gideon March. While Alma nervously prepares for Meg's wedding, Amy shows her new sketches to an appreciative Cecilia, and Jo, still resentful, glowers throughout. Meg and John decide to use as their wedding vows the ones Alma and Gideon wrote for their own ceremony years ago. As the parents, assisted by Beth, teach them to the young couple, a feverish Laurie accosts Jo and confesses his love for her. Jo resists; Amy, eavesdropping, overhears their argument. Jo spurns Laurie; he, stung and enraged, flees. Amy accuses Jo of heartlessness before running off to follow Laurie. Jo, regrouping from the second person in her life abandoning her for love, strategizes: if she gives Laurie time and absence, he'll change back into the friend she's always cherished. Struck by an idea, she retreats to the house, as Beth, overwhelmed by heat and weakness, collapses at the piano. Meg cries for help for Beth as the act concludes. Act II Scene One: One year later, the publishing offices of THE DAILY VOLCANO, a fiction tabloid based in New York City.   Jo March at the offices of the tabloid THE DAILY VOLCANO. Dashwood (Derrick Parker), the wry publisher of the sensation sheet, grills Jo as to why she's come to town. She tells her story, and demands to know if he'll buy "The Curse of the Coventries." Unmoved, he offers her $25 for an edited version; Jo, tough as ever, insists on "Thirty dollars, and two free copies. I have sisters at home." Triumphant, Jo returns to her boarding house, and writes to her family, which, while loving as ever, is pulling apart under pressure. Meg and John are struggling with sleeplessness and short temper as the parents of twins; Laurie has left home to study at Oxford; Amy is on a tour of Europe under the sponsorship of Aunt Cecilia; and Beth's continued denial of her failing health convinces no one but herself. Even Jo finds herself distracted by the offer of light supper and the opera by a new acquaintance at her boarding house, Friedrich Bhaer (Chen-Ye Yuan). Scene Two: Jo's boarding house; the March parlor; and a sunny lane on the campus of Oxford.   Amy March and Laurie at Oxford. Jo and Bhaer trade histories and spiritedly argue points of taste while, in Oxford, Amy delicately sounds out Laurie on how much or little he still feels for Jo. Meanwhile, a haunted Beth, doggedly composing at midnight, at last acknowledges the death that awaits her and, wordlessly, rages and mourns in ever-more-dissonant strokes at the piano. Jo, playfully chiding Bhaer for the same aesthetic stiffness she thinks she sees in her father, challenges him to recommend a worthier art than the melodrama she unashamedly enjoys. Bhaer responds by reciting, in the original German, a poem of Goethe's ("Kennst du das Land?"). Jo requests a translation. Bhaer's English rendering ("Do you know the land?") is a confession of love under a mask of storytelling. Jo, moved despite herself, is distracted by a desperate telegram from Alma: Beth has taken a turn for the worse. Rejecting Bhaer's support, Jo returns to Concord. Scene Three: Beth's bedroom. A translucent Beth dozes in a throne of pillows as her family keeps vigil. A disheveled Jo bursts in; Beth bids her family leave the two of them alone. Frantic, Jo tries to convince her that she will recover and prattles on about a possible restorative trip to the seaside before Beth, with a hint of her old force, silences her. She urges Jo to accept her impending death. "Mother and father -- you're all they've got now. Promise me you'll take care of them," Beth insists; Jo accedes. Relieved, spent, Beth drowses; Jo drowses beside her. When Jo awakes, Beth has died. Scene Four: The path in front of the March house.   Aunt Cecilia March. Aunt Cecilia baits Jo with Amy's latest letter, which relates that she is now, at last, "loved beyond compare, loved beyond belief" by Laurie. A weary Jo accepts the news, and, pressed by Cecilia, admits that Friedrich Bhaer seems to have abandoned her as well: no letters from him have arrived. Strangely satisfied, Cecilia announces to Jo that she has revised her will to leave Plumfield, her orchard estate, to Jo; her death will render Jo independent for the rest of her life. She urges Jo to use her pending wealth and power, as she, Cecilia, has done, to isolate herself from the pain that loving others (like Meg, Laurie, Beth) is bound to inflict. Jo, appalled at this vision of her possible future, rejects the stunned Cecilia and flees. Scene Five: The attic.   Friedrich Bhaer and Jo. "What endures?" Jo asks no one, and then wanders through the attic, bringing us back to the very moments the opera began. Laurie, as before, enters, apologizing and suggesting, innocently, that they go back to the "perfect way it was"; but this time Jo demurs. "The happy old times can't come back, and we mustn't expect it," she tells him. Relieved, admiring, Laurie leaves her in peace. Overwhelmed by feeling, Jo calls on her memories of the sisters of her girlhood and, ghostlike, they materialize. In forgiveness and gratitude, she celebrates what they were and releases them to what they are now. Unexpectedly, the attic door opens a third time; it's not Laurie, but Friedrich Bhaer, in town by chance and eager to see her. "Is now the good moment?" he asks. "Now is all there is," Jo realizes. She extends her hand to him as the opera concludes.

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