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From Literary Classic to Hit Opera
Composer Mark Adamo Traces His First Opera's Journey to the Stage

It was logical given our enthusiam for Carlisle Floyd’s operas that USOperaWeb would want to meet Mark Adamo. Mark’s first opera, Little Women (based on the classic novel by Louisa May Alcott), was given its world premiere in 1998 by Houston Grand Opera Studio. It met with such extraordinary success that HGO’s General Director, David Gockley, scheduled it for a revival in 2000, at the same time that Floyd’s latest opera, Cold Sassy Tree, was making its debut. Floyd and Adamo are friends, the elder also playing the role of mentor to the younger. Both were writers before they were composers and both write the words and the music for their operas. Individually, they use somewhat different musical vocabularies, but they share an important common trait: they create music dramas in which the musical and theatrical elements are equally vivid, immediate and truthful.

We were excited to find out about Mark’s experience adapting Little Women to the opera stage and his reaction to the enthusiastic response it enjoyed, and, naturally, we wanted to know about his beginnings.

"I was born in Philadelphia. There weren’t a lot of musical experiences growing up. I started writing stories when I was seven and started appearing in amateur theater productions when I was twelve. There wasn’t a piano in the house, so at theatre rehearsals, I would stand absolutely hypnotized when someone played the piano. Years later I found out that my mother had been a band singer as a young woman.

"During my junior year in high school I had a paper route and Friday was collection day. There was a certain woman whose stop on the route I used to save until the very end. I would get there about 8:00 and she would leave me alone to go look for the money. While she was gone I would sit at the piano, improvising. She would be gone for about an hour and then she’d come back and exclaim, ‘Look! I found it!’ It became a running joke, although we never really acknowledged it. One day, she told me she was getting rid of the piano and asked if I would take it off her hands for $50. My family’s objections were overcome by its size – it was only six octaves and was small enough to fit in the corner of our living room, and it had a quiet, almost celeste-like tone. (My father needed to sleep during the day for his work schedule so it couldn’t be too loud.) And it was $50! So, I got it and started to obsessively teach myself to play.

"There wasn’t any concert thinking in my family, and because I had come to writing and theatre so early and to music so late, I planned to get a degree in music so I could be as sophisticated a theater composer as possible.

"At eighteen I entered the playwriting program at New York University. I took what amounted to a double major in music – every elective I took was in music -- even though the playwriting program didn’t allow that. I completed most of the playwriting degree and then finished with a composition degree cum laude at Catholic University in Washington. To my surprise—because I still didn’t think of myself as a concert composer—certain musicians at the University and, later, in the National Symphony Orchestra offered me commissions: for chorus, chamber ensembles, and for mezzo-soprano.

"I was distracted, though, from the piece for mezzo-soprano, because a number of friends had died or were dying at that time and all I could think of took the shape of an AIDS memorial, a design for singing voice, speaking voice, and orchestra. I started to write it more or less in a vacuum. Then Eclipse Chamber Orchestra, the chamber orchestra of the National Symphony asked me to write something for their inaugural season. I told them about the piece I was writing, that it was on an AIDS theme, and that I didn’t know if that was what they wanted. The short version of the story is that Sylvia Alimena, who conducts Eclipse, told me to write whatever I wanted and that she would be happy to introduce it.

"Even then I didn’t take it seriously – I thought Sylvia, whom I knew slightly, was just being polite. But, eventually they called me with a date—at which point I knew they were sincere. That piece, Late Victorians, was very meaningful, both for me and for the orchestra. It was then that I realized that there were too many very smart people who believed in my composition for them all to be delusional. So as unlikely as it seemed from my background and history, I finally began to believe that perhaps I did belong in the concert world.

"A small opera company affiliated with Catholic University had heard of the symphony and approached me about a commission for their 25^th season for an opera based on Little Women. Up front, I resisted. I knew opera would use what I thought was my greatest strength, which was combining music and words in the theatre. But I thought that Little Women was probably the least promising topic for operatic adaptation. I had read the book as a child. My parents had subscribed to a children’s book club for my sisters and me and every month we would get a double volume -- Twain, Kipling, London, and the like. And then there was the Alcott volume, which contained Little Women and Little Men. So we all read it at the same time and cried like everyone does at Beth’s death.

"But approaching it as an adult, I couldn’t find any sense of architecture that could be adapted to the theater, let alone to the opera house. The piece was organized as a series of anecdotes; there was no psychological or dramatic motor. I didn’t know if I could find a way into it as a dramatist and as a musician.

"Interestingly, in my reading, I found out that Alcott had been as resistant to writing Little Women as I had been to adapting it! She had been writing rather purple, melodramatic pieces for newspapers, which were drawing readers. The publishers of some rather didactic children’s fiction approached her about writing a domestic children’s book that taught moral lessons at the end of each chapter. Naturally, she balked: no masked balls? No murders? But she decided to try it.

"That’s one of the reason the books doesn’t feel like it has a shape. Its character observations are extremely vivid. But I don’t think anyone values Little Women for its architecture as a novel. It’s a great tapestry – you can dip into it at any given moment. Certainly that’s a common feature of a certain genre of 19^th century novel—particularly the ones that were serialized in periodical publications. God knows Dickens was no stranger to the extraneous incident!

"I looked at the other adaptations. There were actually five attempts for the lyric stage: an opera in 1920, an operetta in 1930, a television adaptation in 1951 (with a score by, of all people, Jerry Adler and Richard Ross of The Pajama Game), and a couple of musicals in the '60s. None of them, to my mind, worked. My great impatience with the film adaptations was that even though they honored Alcott in portraying Jo as a free-spirited, tomboyish, independent, artistic creature, after 30 minutes or so they felt they had to pair her off. ‘Who’s the boy? Who’s the romance?’

"And every version, for stage or screen, lost energy when the story left the March home. As soon as we abandoned the family, the piece evanesced. So I started looking much more carefully, not at the New York or London sequences, but at the early part of the book, at the family history.

"It was a moment in the 1949 film version with June Allison that gave me in a flash what the piece was about. Jo has dressed up as a proper young lady, as opposed to her usual tomboyish demeanor, and has visited the publisher of a small fiction tabloid to sell one of her overripe melodramas. Laurie has followed her to find out why she is going into town. The building which houses the publisher also houses a dentist, so Laurie , waiting for her, thinks she is getting a tooth pulled. She looks very stiff and square-shouldered when she comes out and Laurie, thinking that she is trying to conceal how uncomfortable she is, asks her if it hurts much. She doesn’t know what he means. Then, she reveals that she was there to sell a story but that she wants Laurie to keep it a secret. In return, Laurie tells her he, too, has a secret and whispers something in her ear. And Jo explodes. It is one of the most intense moments in a film which otherwise doesn’t generate much emotional heat. She runs away, her hat flies off, and the camerawork transforms her utterly from this artificially constrained adult back to an adolescent tomboy. She arrives at her front gate and she sees her older sister, Meg, who has been her confidante, and Brooke, Laurie’s tutor, and they are clearly available to each other in a romantic way. And Jo’s face turns to ice.

"Suddenly I got what the piece was about: Jo trying to maintain her perfectly happy family. At that moment in her adolescence her relationship with her parents and her sisters has achieved a perfect balance of freedom and intimacy. But from that point on, for no villainous or melodramatic reasons, all of the people closest to Jo end up abandoning her. What encouraged me was that the events of the book which supported that idea were precisely those that have become so canonical in the history of its adaptation: Meg marrying Brooke, Laurie confessing that he is in love with Jo (which Jo sees as an abandonment because it’s a change), and, of course, Beth’s death. Obviously, no one is conspiring to abandon Jo. Each is just attending to his or her individual needs. I’ve certainly gone through pain like that. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t.

"So, now I got extremely excited about the project: it began to take a shape I could hear. Of course, that shape demanded some radical reductions of the original, because what I was refining, while clearly visible in the original material, is lost amid a million other things. The entire first half of the book is condensed into the first scene of the opera, and I’ve cut half of the second part of the book.

"But now, I knew I could write a piece that had its own life—it wouldn’t depend on the book for its impact—so with great enthusiasm I brought the design back to Washington—and they didn’t want it! They had engaged a librettist, who was not a writer, and wanted something much more nostalgic and episodic—something, in fact, very close in structure to the other failed stage versions. I apologized and said, ‘I can’t do this,’ and withdrew. So having been dragged into it and having transformed it, suddenly I had no opportunity to write it.

"Carlisle Floyd came to my rescue. I had met him about six months earlier when I was a music reporter for the Washington Post. I had gone to Houston to cover the premiere of Harvey Milk and in the process of interviewing the writers of that, I talked to Carlisle. We got along like a house afire, as my father would say, and became friends after that. I had been talking to him as Little Women was evolving. So, when it all fell apart, I called him and said, ‘Hello, this is Mark Adamo and I’ve just cut my own throat—please call…’

"Carlisle suggested that I offer it to Houston, which had not crossed my mind because I was, obviously, not a composer with a national reputation. Given that Houston’s commissions had been from John Adams, Leonard Bernstein, and, of course, Carlisle, offering it to HGO seemed as appropriate as taking it to the Met! But Carlisle asked me to send it to him and said he would talk to David Gockley, [General Director of Houston Grand Opera].

"Well, nothing had happened after five months, and I put it out of my head. (It wasn’t as though I was going to nag them.) Then I got a call saying they had a spot for a small commission for the Houston Opera Studio. It would be two performances only and if I wanted to do it under these circumstances, they would love to have the piece. And then any number of things happened.

[Part II]