Big Women: Mark Adamo's Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess between Monteverdi and Musical Comedy

We live in an age when opera companies across America are regularly presenting new operas, and some of them are even making hesitant first steps into repertory status, though it is too soon to tell how long- or short-lived their performance history will be. Opera itself began—Peri's Dafne (1597) is commonly regarded as the starting point—as an attempt to recreate Greek tragedy on the stage, and for at least its first two hundred years, plots drawing on classical material, if not always classical literary texts, were staples. Nineteenth-century opera composers were relatively less inclined to turn to the classics for plots and characters, but the twentieth century witnessed renewed activity in classically based operas, from Strauss' Elektra (1909) and Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1927) to Hans Werner Henze's Venus und Adonis (1997) and Randolph Peters' The Golden Ass (1999), to name but a few significant examples. Mark Adamo's Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess, which premiered in Houston in 2005, is among the first operas in our new century to continue the tradition.

Accompanied by a trio of distinguished distaff classicists, I attended the 2006 revival of Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess at the New York City Opera. Some months later, as word of the outing—any resemblance to this or any other Aristophanic comedy is purely accidental—trickled out, AJP's editor asked me to write this "Brief Mention." The reader will infer, then, that I neither watched nor listened with the idea of writing such a notice. What follows are reflections based partially on recollection of my immediate impressions (especially of the music) but also on subsequent study of the published libretto,¹ Adamo's earlier and quite popular Little Women (1998), and stray remarks of the composer in published or online interviews. In no sense is it a review of the particular April 2nd matinee performance that I saw. Of that let me say that my impression was almost uniformly positive. The principals, who have very demanding parts (and not only vocally), were strong; several were reprising roles they had taken in the Houston world premiere.

Adamo states on the title page of the libretto that the opera is "[f]reely adapted from the play by Aristophanes," and this is both true and to the good. Before I turn to the adaptation itself, it might be worth observing that within the reception history of ancient stageworks in opera, the tradition of classical comedies turned into operas is relatively slight. I put it that way because, of course, one might well argue that New Comedy in its Roman form is the ultimate source of all opera buffa. I say nothing new when I place Figaro directly in the line of servi callidi.²

Greek Old Comedy (i.e., given the state of preservation, Aristophanes) has only infrequently provided fodder for opera. One of the most interesting cases is Walter Braunfels' setting of Aristophanes Birds—Die Vögel—premiered in 1920. Braunfels (1882–1954) was fired from his teaching post by the Nazis in 1933—he was half Jewish—and his works were banished from the repertory. Die Vögel, his most successful stagework, has been recently revived, and a recording is available in Decca's "Entartete ["degenerate"] Musik" series. One must also recall the famous Frogs performed in the pool of Yale's Payne Whitney Gymnasium in 1941, since, a generation later, in 1975, the piece was revived, provided with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and, like so many other shows, transferred from New Haven (if not the Shubert) to Broadway.³

Aristophanes is more at home, I would argue, in American musical comedy than in opera, at least opera as it has come to be received by modern audiences treated almost without exception to post-Gluckian opera, with major houses, until recently, shunning the more interesting hybrids. (Think even of Carmen and how long it took for it to lose the recitatives by Guiraud that replaced the original opéra comique spoken dialogue.) To modern spectators or readers, Aristophanes, with...