an opera by Mark Adamo
Gil Rose, conductor
Saturday, February 15, 2025, at 7:30 p.m. ET
New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, 30 Gainsborough Street, Boston, MA
Program is subject to change.
Composer-librettist, Mark Adamo tells – in his 2005 opera, Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess – not a story: a situation. “It’s a delicious premise. It is not a plot.” In this radical re-invention, an already scandalous drama of war and love blossoms into 21st Century relevance and deepens into an exploration of the human condition. “I love Lysistrata's strut and wit and nerve, its utopian yearnings, its magical locale — an Acropolis where, by dream-logic, a handful of couples can reconcile the love of the battlefield with the battlefield of love” (Adamo).
Aristophanes’s Lysistrata is a comedy about the women of Athens and Sparta who, disgusted by a pointless war, barricade themselves in the Athenian treasury and swear a sanction on sex until their men make peace. Adamo, in a creative process of poetic reduction and a celebration of the original play’s subtle socio-ethical ambiguities, invents a romance between Lysistrata and the Athenian leader Nico.
Adamo “wanted to scour this opera clean of sexual cliché — I believe that vice and virtue, surrender and assault, beckon as seductively to women as to men, and ‘who's on top?’ isn't necessarily the same question as ‘who's in control?’ As with sex, so with war: I could no more recite a familiar rhetoric of the evils of war than I could blithely exult in bloodshed.” As the drama escalates, so the music un- and re-folds, compiling implications of emotion, identity, and the human condition; “no sooner is a theme sung by one character, given one meaning, than it is assumed by someone else and inflected with quite another… The libretto suggests, ‘Each of you will tell the truth; neither will agree.’ The score aims to make that suggestion an audible process.”
- Adapted from Mark Adamo’s website: https://www.markadamo.com/compositions/lysistrata.