Jan. 7, 2025

Treasures from the HGO Vaults: Mark Adamo's Lysistrata

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The Athenian and Spartan women seize the Acropolis in Mark Adamo's Lysistrata (all photos from the 2005 HGO world premiere)

Mark Adamo’s first opera, Little Women, premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1998. This Louisa May Alcott adaptation was an enormous success that resonated with audiences longing for quality new opera that didn’t resort to the usual alienating affectations of contemporary fare. Adamo’s work struck the perfect balance of accessibility and inventiveness. His style was rooted in the idiomatically American school of the 20th century: Copland, Barber, Gershwin, Bernstein, Sondheim. It was emotionally rich without descending into sappy sentimentalism. It was tonal and melody-driven without sacrificing intelligence and taste. And it possessed a sense of musical wit and humor that was missing from overly serious operas of the turn-of-the-millennium.

 

But what set Adamo apart was an intuitive understanding of how to construct an opera. This undoubtedly emerged from the composer’s dual background in playwrighting and composition, both of which he studied as an undergraduate. An opera isn’t simply a play set to pitches, but a marriage of drama and musical form. In cases where the words and sounds emanate from one and the same creator, this cohesion is particularly strong. Adamo belongs to that rare breed of consummate artist, the librettist-composer. It makes an audible difference: his operas are organized according to a sophisticated logic that the average listener can readily pick up on. The musical themes lay out a roadmap to the drama, but—and this is the far more difficult task—his libretto provides a clear set of blueprints for the work’s compositional structure.

 

HGO recognized this gift and, the year after Little Women premiered, the company commissioned Adamo’s next opera. Unsurprisingly, the theatrically minded composer turned to the very beginnings of the Western stage tradition—Greek drama. But unlike most operatic creators, who typically gravitate toward tragedy, Adamo made the unconventional decision to adapt a comedy: Aristophanes’s Lysistrata. It follows a band of Athenian and Trojan women determined to end the war raging between their city-states. Led by the titular heroine, they stage a sex strike, refusing to bed with their warrior lovers until peace is declared.

 

Aristophanes penned the play in 411 B.C. in response to the Peloponnesian War. In a tragic bit of irony, Adamo found himself composing his adaptation amidst an equally controversial conflict, the Iraq War. Even after two-and-a-half millennia, mankind had yet to learn its lesson. Our seemingly immutable desire to kill one another became a central theme in Adamo’s opera, the full title of which is Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess. By touching on more serious topics and by delving into characters’ psychology, Adamo managed to expand Aristophanes’s play from a slightly political sex comedy into a thought-provoking study of human relationships. 

 

Unfortunately, the work never received the attention it deserved. The March 2005 HGO premiere production by Michael Kahn played at New York City Opera the following year. In 2012, Fort Worth Opera mounted a new staging that featured the original HGO costumes by Murell Horton. Pittsburgh Festival Opera created a film version in 2021 that had some selected local screenings. Most recently, the convservatory students of Mannes Opera offered a brief two-night run of Lysistrata in 2024. Otherwise, the opera has been woefully underperformed.

 

However, Lysistrata has yet to slip into complete obscurity. In February 2025, Odyssey Opera and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project will perform a concert version, to be released on CD by the BMOP’s house label. Curious listeners will finally have an opportunity to experience a significant work that had its birth at HGO 20 years ago. In the meantime, this post offers a deep dive into the origins of Adamo’s second opera, touching on its historical context, the premiere production, the libretto, and the score.

 

Synopsis

 

HGO World Premiere Cast and Creative Team

 

LYSIA (later LYSISTRATA), lirico-spinto soprano, beloved of Nico: Emily Pulley

MYRRHINE, lyric mezzo-soprano, beloved of Kinesias, younger friend of Lysia: Laquita Mitchell

KLEONIKE, mezzo-contralto, leader of the Athenian women’s resistance: Myrna Paris

LAMPITO, dramatic mezzo-contralto, wife of Leonidas: Victoria Livengood

NIKIAS (NICO), lyric tenor, leader of the Athenian army: Chad Shelton

KINESIAS, high lyric baritone, beloved of Myrrhine: Joshua Hopkins

LEONIDAS, lyric bass-baritone, leader of the Spartan army: Joshua Winograde

 

CONDUCTOR: Stefan Lano

DIRECTOR: Michael Kahn

SET DESIGNER: Derek McLane

COSTUME DEISGNER: Murrell Horton

 

INVOCATION

The three Furies—demi-goddesses of vengeance—exhort the citizens of Athens (i.e. the opera audience) to attend their tale.

 

PROLOGOS

Kleonike leads a protest of Athenian women demanding the end of the war between Sparta and Athens, which has claimed the lives of countless men. In a miniature play, they act out the beginnings of the conflict: 70 years ago, the two Greek city-states laid claim to the same island and have been fighting over it ever since.

 

ACT I

 

Scene 1

Lysia interrupts and asks the women to keep it down—she’s expecting her boyfriend, the Athenian general Nikias. When “Nico” arrives, Lysia hounds him for neglecting her and not resigning from the army, as he promised. He charms her with his seductive wiles, but just before things get hot and heavy, the sound of martial music calls Nico back to his troops. Alone and enraged, Lysia declares war.

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Emily Pulley (Lysia), Chad Shelton (Nico)

Parodos

The Athenian and Spartan armies drill, preparing to battle one another the next day. Meanwhile, Lysia drafts a letter to Kleonike telling her she knows a way to end the war once and for all.

 

Scene 2

At dawn the following morning, Lysia summons both the Athenian and the enemy Spartan women. She poses an unorthodox solution to bring about peace: a total sanction on sex. United by their common desire for peace, the women of both sides will withhold all intimacy until their men agree to an armistice. Lysia’s best friend Myrrhine questions whether she’s willing to risk her love for Kinesias, an Athenian officer. But Lampito, the stentorian wife of the Spartan general Leonidas, declares her devotion to the scheme. All the other women follow suit, and Lysia has them swear an oath.

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Victoria Livengood (Lampito), Emily Pulley (Lysia), Myrna Paris (Kleonike), Laquita Mitchell (Myrrhine)

Scene 3

At the Athenian camp, Kinesias confides to Nico that he’s beginning to wonder whether the glory of war is worth being separated from Myrrhine. Suddenly, a message arrives from the Athenian women: a horde of female Spartans has attacked, forcing them to seek shelter in the Acropolis. The army rushes to Athens, where they encounter the male Spartan warriors, who received an equally bogus report. Just then, the doors of the Acropolis open to reveal the women of both cities. They inform the men of their sex strike—in the meantime, the ladies will occupy the Acropolis, which houses the Athenian treasury and armory. Refusing to succumb to their wives’ demands, the Spartan and Athenian men unite against the women in this standoff. War between the sexes is declared.

 

ACT II

 

Scene 1

Weeks later, deprived of release, the men find themselves in a visibly “stiff” situation. The Spartan general Leonidas suggests to Nico that they might consider acquiescing to the women. Nico refuses, stubbornly maintaining his unquestioning duty to Athens.

 

Scene 2

Meanwhile, back at the Acropolis, the women are themselves feeling the itch. Kleonike sneaks in, seeking a quick tryst with Myrrhine. Lysia intercedes and leads her friend in a calculated “attack”: Myrrhine teases her lover to the point of climax, only to deny him satisfaction at the last moment. Kinesias returns to the other men, who, now at their wits’ end, beg Nico to reconsider.

 

Scene 3

Nico goes to see Lysia at the Acropolis, and the two strike a bargain: if Lysia ends the coital boycott, Nico will finally resign from the army and return to her. Lysia is prepared to announce her decision when Kleonike and the women arrive. As a token of appreciation for Lysia’s leadership, they bestow on her a new name—“Lysistrata,” meaning “she who brings peace.” (Note: A more literal translation would be “Disbander of Armies.”)

 

Nico enters with the Spartan and Athenian men, expecting the newly christened Lysistrata to surrender. But moved by her followers’ devotion, she breaks her deal with Nico. Instead, she gives the two sides one final opportunity to reach a treaty, symbolized by a giant statue of the goddess Peace. Adorning this nude figure is a map of the contested island, which Lysistrata instructs the men to share like a polyamorous lover. They reluctantly agree to the terms. Humiliated, Nico ends his relationship with Lysistrata, who realizes that her allegiance now lies in the pacifist cause.

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Emily Pulley (Lysia), Victoria Livengood (Lampito), Myrna Paris (Kleonike)

A celebration banquet is held, during which Kinesias and Leonidas begin to bicker over how to divvy up the island. When the two slay one another in anger, war threatens to break out again. But in a dei ex machina, Ares and Aphrodite descend to earth and intercede. They warn the Spartans and Athenians that, unless they work toward understanding, the bloodshed shall never end. The united Greeks recognize the error of their ways, and Kinesias and Leonidas are resurrected. All sing a hymn to life, love, and peace.                                                                      

 

Greece is the Word: Greek Comedy in Opera and Musical Theater

 

To understand the context of Adamo’s Lysistrata, we have to go 400 years in the past to the very beginnings of opera. The genre emerged out of Italian intellectual circles during the Renaissance, a time when Europeans were rediscovering classical Greco-Roman culture. Opera was conceived as a kind of resurrection of Ancient Greek drama, which had been sung or chanted. The first operas were, unsurprisingly, adaptations of Greek myths. Librettists typically turned to ancient tragedies over comedies. The plays of Euripides, which depicted larger-than-life protagonists in extreme situations, were especially well-suited to this emotionally charged new art form.

 

Granted, there aren’t too many Greek comedies to begin with—only 13 extant plays, the bulk of them by Aristophanes. By comparison, there are more than twice as many tragedies. When Neapolitan opera creators began developing a comic subgenre with opera buffa in the 18th century, their model was the commedia dell’arte tradition of Italian folk theater rather than classical sources. Greek comedy wouldn’t become a significant inspiration for opera composers until the 20th century, with works like Walter Braunfels’s 1920 adaptation of Aristophanes’s The Birds.

 

But the kinds of madcap plots and bawdy dialogues found in Aristophanes were right at home in another art form—musical comedy. We can see this beginning during the 19th century in the Greek-themed operettas of Jacques Offenbach, namely Orpheus in the Underworld (1858) and The Beautiful Helen (1864). Though based on tragic myths, these retellings were rowdy parodies in the spirit of Greek comedy. The irreverent genre of operetta afforded opportunities to incorporate modern-day references and raucous popular tunes like the “Galop infernal”—the iconic can-can from Orpheus.

 

As operetta evolved into the American musical, creators gradually recognized that Aristophanes’s plays were ripe for the Broadway stage and the silver screen. The 1955 movie-musical The Second Greatest Sex, with songs by Phil Moody and Doris “Pony” Sherrell, was a reimagining of Lysistrata set in the Old West. 1961 saw the theatrical premiere of another Lysistrata adaptation, The Happiest Girl in the World, which restored the action to Ancient Greece. The musical numbers were all taken from Offenbach’s operettas—including Orpheus and Helen—and fitted with new texts by Wizard of Oz lyricist Yip Harburg.

 

A year later, Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way the Way to the Forum opened on Broadway. Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart’s book is indebted to Roman rather than Greek theater, but it’s a sex comedy in much the same vein as Lysistrata. Sondheim and Shevelove teamed up again in 1974 for their musical version of Aristophanes’s The Frogs. Nathan Lane helped to revise the work in 2004, the year before HGO staged Adamo’s Lysistrata.

 

Finally, it’s worth mentioning Disney’s animated feature Hercules from 1997. The film’s score is far from juvenile—composer Alan Menken and lyricist David Zippel produced a soundtrack of memorable songs that rival any “legitimate” Broadway show. Zippel’s hilarious Greek-themed puns seem to have rubbed off on Adamo: compare “He could tell you what the Grecian urn” from Hercules to “We’re down on our Peloponnese” from Lysistrata. Though, it’s more likely Adamo picked up this kind of wordplay from Sondheim, who was a master of verbal wit.

 

Still, there’s no denying the other echoes of Disney’s Hercules in Lysistrata. For instance, Adamo opens his opera with a trio of Furies who address the crowd in an invocation marked “quasi-gospel” in the score, calling to mind the quintet of gospel-crooning Muses who narrate Hercules. The most obvious influence can be seen in the visual aesthetic of Michael Kahn’s production for HGO. The sets by Derek McLane and especially the costumes by Murell Horton are highly reminiscent of the Hercules designs by cartoonist Gerald Scarfe.

 

In his concept sketches, Horton emulates Scarfe’s color palette as well as his trademark combination of voluptuous silhouettes with jagged edges or protruding spikes. And as in Hercules, contemporary and Hellenic elements intermingle in the costumes, props, and scenery—often to humorous effect. For example, the women’s picket-signs bear phrases like “PEACE NOW” written in the same kind of pseudo-Greek font used in the Disney film. Bringing our discussion full circle, Scarfe was himself an opera designer and created an iconic production of Offenbach’s Orpheus that HGO mounted in 1986.

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Costume designs by Murell Horton

Libretto

 

When he first started planning Lysistrata in 1999, Adamo was unable to find an entry point into the project. While Aristophanes’s tale of an anti-war sex boycott offered “a delicious premise,” Adamo admitted that it was “not a plot.” By the standards of a post-Shakespearean age, the play is somewhat lacking in substance: “Our heroine concocts this strategy; she bullies her team into agreeing; the plan works; end of play.”

 

“I knew I had to find, or create, the richer drama it demanded,” Adamo explains in his program note. Many lines in his libretto are taken verbatim from Aristophanes. But for the most part, the play served as a kind of skeleton or scaffolding for the composer to build on. Much of the challenge lay in fleshing out Aristophanes’s two-dimensional characters, which “are less persons than personae, masks of text through which their playwright declaims an impassioned political broadside.” One solution Adamo struck upon was to add new characters that would help to develop the psychological profiles of the existing ones.

 

In the original Aristophanes, the heroine only briefly mentions that she has an unseen husband. For his libretto, Adamo gives her a boyfriend, the Athenian general Nikias. Nicknamed “Nico,” he provides a personal catalyst for Lysia’s protest. Initially apathetic toward the Spartan-Athenian war, she only embraces the pacifist cause after Nico neglects her. Their relationship serves to intensify the conflict as Lysia struggles to reconcile her love for Nico with her loyalty to her fellow women.

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Joshua Winograde (Leonidas), Chad Shelton (Nico)

In this sense, Adamo’s adaptation touches on deeper themes than Aristophanes’s decidedly farcical burlesque. The composer makes this explicit on the score’s title page with his generic label, “a tragicomedy.” But this isn’t to say that the work has been sucked dry of its humor. On the contrary, the serious elements endow the comedy with real heart—rather than laughing at the characters, we now laugh along with them, because we relate to them as human beings.

 

Even if Adamo’s take on Lysistrata shifted in tone from its source, the composer preserved certain conventions of ancient theater in deference to Aristophanes. Initially, the all-important and ever-present Greek chorus would seem to be missing—the score specifies 17 soloists playing 24 named roles, but there are no choristers. Nevertheless, the work is an ensemble piece that often feels choral in its contrapuntal vocal writing. In addition, the cast is split into competing male and female subgroups, reflecting the gender-separated “half-choruses” of Aristophanes’s play.

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Heidi Stober (Charito), Jennifer Root (Sappho), Laquita Mitchell (Myrrhine), Emily Pulley (Lysia), Susan Holsonbake (Dika), Victoria Livengood (Lampito)

Adamo also retains many of the formal divisions of Greek theater, such as the ritual “Invocation” that commences the opera. This is more typical of Homeric epics, which begin with the poet praying for assistance from the Muses. But choral invocations can be found scattered throughout Aristophanes’s comedies. In Adamo’s opera, it’s a trio of demi-goddesses—the vengeful Furies—who invoke the audience to attend to the drama. This gives way to a “Prologos” that serves the same function as a Greek prologue, introducing the central characters and conflict.

 

Between the first two scenes of Act I is a passage marked “Parodos.” According to Aristotle in his Poetics, this is “the first undivided utterance of the Chorus.” And, indeed, Adamo’s “Parados” concludes with a Rossinian ensemble number for the combined male and female members of the cast. Rounding out the opera is a typical deus ex machina. This Latin phrase, meaning “god from the machine,” refers to the onstage descent of a deity to quickly resolve the drama. In the case of Lysistrata, Adamo ends with a plural “Dei ex Machina,” since Ares and Aphrodite make a joint appearance.

 

Some aspects of Adamo’s libretto that might seem like clever modern touches are actually taken from Aristophanes. The libretto is almost entirely in rhyming verse, often resembling a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Although Aristophanes rarely employed rhyme, large portions of his dramas were in meter, especially the choral songs. In a particularly hilarious move, Adamo gives the Spartans an ambiguously foreign accent (“like progeny of Jessye Norman and Elmer Fudd”) to set them apart from the Athenians. This is, in fact, a nod to the Spartans of the original play, who speak in a stereotyped Laconian dialect of Greek.

 

One unmissable component of Michael Kahn’s HGO production really “stuck out,” so to speak. To show that the men had gone long without gratification, the male members of the cast were fitted with their own, well, male members. But again, these prop protuberances weren’t a contemporary contrivance. They were taken directly from Aristophanes, who calls for fake phalluses in Lysistrata. The play is shockingly lewd, even by today’s standards. While Adamo is far from prudish, he sublimates Aristophanes’s gratuitous bedroom jokes into tasteful innuendos. As director Kahn characterizes the libretto, it’s “a good, healthy, amused version of bawdiness.”

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Chad Shelton (Nico), Jennifer Root (Sapho), Marjorie Owens ( Xanthe), Laquita Mitchell (Myrrhine), Myrna Paris (Kleonike), Victoria Livengood (Lampito)

On the “Dramatis Personae” page of his score, Adamo describes the opera’s setting: “The time is now. The place is ancient Greece.” This paradoxical phrase is lovingly lifted from Sondheim and Shevelove’s musical of Aristophanes’s The Frogs. But in the case of Lysistrata, it’s Adamo’s subtle way of alluding to political events that were unfolding at the time of the work’s premiere. In 2003, when the composer was still working on Lysistrata, the United States invaded Iraq. This launched an eight-year conflict that that felt just as endless as the Peloponnesian War that raged during the 411 B.C. premiere of Aristophanes’s play. “An opera begun in peacetime finds itself, today, scaldingly topical,” observes the composer in his program note.

 

And yet, Adamo was wary of falling into the usual lazy or superficial interpretations of the play. He wanted to avoid wielding it “as the megaphone of protest through which we assail the war du jour.” Reality, as it always turns out, is far more ambiguous and complex. “I knew I couldn’t write this piece without engaging, however obliquely, the problem of war. Is aggression ever justified, in love or by law? … I could no more recite a familiar rhetoric of the evils of war than I could blithely exult in bloodshed.” In the end, Adamo’s opera raises difficult ethical quandaries that can’t be answered in pre-packaged pacifist platitudes. As Ares and Aphrodite repeat in their “Dei ex Machina” number, “never will it end.”  It’s an honest admission that war is an inevitable part of the human condition.

 

Adamo isn’t simply shrugging off responsibility. Rather, he’s acknowledging the limitations of opera as a realistic tool for achieving any drastic change: “No artwork can presume to resolve any political argument. But I would love to think The Nude Goddess could, in some small way, reframe our current argument—that hearing these passions and positions voiced and embodied by closely imagined personalities might help clarify our thinking and heighten our sympathy for those with whom we disagree.”

 

While it’s tempting to read every detail of the plot through the lens of the Iraq War, it’s a fruitless exercise. The work has far more to say about the relationship between the sexes. “I wondered: could one compose a Lysistrata principally fascinated by the war between men and women?” asks Adamo. “Could you make an opera that used the civic conflict to illuminate the erotic discord, not vice versa?” The genius of Adamo’s opera ultimately lies in this metaphorical connection, which permeates the libretto and even becomes integral to the score’s compositional design, as we’ll discover.

 

“A Labyrinth of Mirrors”: Adamo’s Musical Language

 

As a composer who writes his own libretti, Adamo inevitably receives comparisons to opera’s arch-auteur, Richard Wagner. And, to be sure, Adamo even develops a system of recurring themes in Lysistrata that—superficially at least—resembles Wagner’s use of leitmotifs. Yet Adamo’s score exhibits an elegant economy that, in many regards, improves on his predecessor’s rather bloated compositional language. Put another way, Adamo achieves more with less.

 

The composer sums up his basic approach in a program note to Lysistrata: “The opera’s score sends its melodies searching through a labyrinth of mirrors; no sooner is a theme sung by one character, given one meaning, than it is assumed by someone else and inflected with quite another.” Adamo organizes his libretto so that certain situations reappear in parallel or analogous forms later in the opera—e.g. Nico breaks off his seduction of Lysia in Act I, Scene 1; Myrrhine does the same to Kinesias in Act II, Scene 2. Usually, identical dialogue from the earlier version is quoted or slightly reworked in the subsequent version.

 

This textual repetition allows Adamo to reprise the corresponding musical material, lending his score a pleasing sonic symmetry. Yet these recapitulations also play a crucial dramatic role. As the composer points out, the same text/music—when placed in a different context—accumulates new layers of meaning. Sometimes, this is simply done for comic or ironic effect. But at a deeper level, Adamo’s reiterations serve to reinforce the opera’s central love/war dichotomy. Many of the musical themes exist in two variants: a “love version” associated with sex and romance, and a “war version” associated with violence and conflict.

 

Over the course of the opera, as the literal battlefield is traded for the metaphorical battle of the sexes, the two concepts begin to overlap. Eroticism is wielded like a kind of weapon and lovers strategize their relationships like generals. Adamo’s musical system of duplications, transformations, and connections—his “labyrinth of mirrors,” as he dubs it—becomes a fitting symbol for the characters’ messy entanglements. It’s also a very audible representation of the gradual merging of love and war that takes place in the opera. Adding another layer of complexity, many of the themes exist in a “peace version”—a reminder of what the Greek women are fighting for in their sexual crusade.

 

However, one shouldn’t get the impression that Adamo’s score is hyper-convoluted or over-conceptualized. On the contrary, the tunefulness and directness of his style help to guide the listener through his “labyrinth of mirrors.” Though Adamo’s procedures are reminiscent of Wagner’s, there are some key differences. Wagner’s leitmotifs—especially in the Ring cycle—can be so brief and organically integrated into the orchestral texture that the average operagoer might occasionally have trouble picking them out.

 

Adamo, by contrast, utilizes an intentionally limited thematic palette, clearly defined forms, and melodies that are instantly recognizable when they return. In fact, he will sometimes reprise complete numbers wholesale with only slight alterations, mainly to the text. This isn’t a condescending “dumbing down” of the music, but a pragmatic approach that shows an understanding of what an audience can realistically register.

 

The following catalogue is by no means exhaustive. Rather, it covers most of the main themes and their significant reprises.

 

Name-Calling Theme

The characters of Lysistrata always seem to be hurling epithets back and forth. Adamo likely took inspiration from Aristophanes’s original dialogue, which is filled with obscene jeers and jibes.  When the women in the opera retell the beginnings of the war during the “Prologos,” they reenact how the Spartan and Athenian men insulted one another with names like “Poacher! Jackass! Imperialist! Terrorist!” (The last two recall rhetoric surrounding the Iraq War, which was two years in when the opera premiered.) This theme resembles a kind of copycat game—the first soloist sings a name on a descending, two-note interval and their opponent repeats it back. They continue in this manner, with each new name stated slightly higher and louder than the previous. Yet the theme isn’t exclusively abusive. In its alternate love version, Nico and Lysia swap sexy nicknames as a form of foreplay.

 

Protest Theme

This theme, as introduced during the women’s protest in the “Prologos,” consists of the phrases “Enough!,” “Peace now!,” and “Not another day!”—all sung to insistent, upward-rising motives. The slogans are framed by a series of instrumental gestures: an ascending harp glissando, a bubbly cascade of sixteenth notes in the woodwinds, and a trumpet flourish supported by timpani and xylophone. The text can easily be applied to different situations—e.g. when Lysia tells Nico she’s had “Enough!” of his neglect. In Act II, once the women’s strike is underway, the men chant their own alternative protest: “Sex now! Not another night!” Adamo makes a clever pun on the original version when the warriors argue over the map of the island, shouting, “Enough! This piece now!” One interesting deviation from the usual “peace” and “sex” variations is Kinesias’s yearnful “Enough, Myrrhine now!” when he slips off to meet her at the Acropolis.

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Myrna Paris (Kleonike), Laquita Mitchell (Myrrhine), Jennifer Root (Sapho), Marjorie Owens (Xanthe)

Checklist Theme

This is another highly formulaic theme reminiscent of the name-calling motive. It simply consists of an individual or group of characters enumerating a list of items—usually “to-dos” in preparation for some task. Each item is followed by the singer’s staccato declaration of “Check” and a tick-mark-like gesture from the orchestra. Again, we find both love and war versions of this theme. It’s introduced when Lysia is completing her toilet and readying her bedroom for a night with Nico: “Hair: Wild. Check. Breasts: Flagrant. Check. Dress: Losable. Check.” In the “Parodos,” it’s sung by the Athenian troops as they don their armor to drill: “Loins…girt? Check! Swords…clean? Check! Spears…ready? Check!” These lists are meant to emphasize the tactical similarities between seduction and combat—a comparison made explicit during Myrrhine’s erotic “attack” on Kinesias. In addition, either version of the theme can be paired with an optional “tag-on” motive sung to the highly militaristic phrase “Strategy is everything.”

 

“Not my own” Theme

This simple, four-note motive (G-D-B-A) serves as the kernel for three contrasting numbers in which Lysia and Nico reach important realizations. These arias aren’t musically identical, but they’re all built around the same theme, which is always sung to some variation of the phrase “not my own.” Adamo introduces it during the lovers’ first meeting, when Lysia berates Nico for prioritizing his career over her. Its initial appearance as “You’re not my own” sets off virtuosic flights of coloratura meant to evoke Lysia’s indignation. The second iteration is the poignant “Nico’s Credo,” in which the general comes to terms with the hard truth of a soldier’s life: “In war, his heart is not his own.” The most fully developed take on the theme is Lysia’s “I Am Not My Own,” delivered immediately after her breakup with Nico. In this Broadway-style torch song, she articulates the new responsibility that has been thrust upon on her. Although she joined the anti-war movement for purely selfish reasons, she finds herself becoming a figurehead for the pacifist cause. Her newfound sense of duty to the women she leads ultimately ruins the relationship she hoped to save in the first place. This melancholy theme comes to encompass the impossibility of reconciling competing personal and political loyalties.

 

“My lips, like so”

Here we have an example of a number repeated in its entirety in a different context. This steamy seduction aria is initially sung by Nico to lure Lysia back into bed after her “You’re not my own” tirade. Marked “Serpentine” in the score, it’s a slinking habanera in 5/4 time that features a sexy solo sax. Not only is it reminiscent of that most famous habanera, Carmen’s “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle,” it also recalls a later number from Bizet’s opera. In Act III, Carmen sings and dances for Don José, but her seduction is cut short when the bugle summons her lover back to the barracks. A near-identical situation unfolds in Lysistrata at the end of “My lips, like so,” when Nico hears a grotesque military band calling him to duty. (Adamo includes a very flaccid-sounding trombone slide to make it clear that the general is no longer “at attention.”)

 

The reprise of “My lips, like so” is sung by Myrrhine when Kinesias visits her at the Acropolis. While Kinesias believes they’re alone, their lovemaking is secretly being watched by the Athenian and Spartan women, who “give scores, as if they were watching an erotic Olympics.” At one point, they cheer on Myrrhine’s caresses with “clean attack!” Indeed, Myrrhine is actually carrying out a calculated maneuver. Just when their passion reaches a high point, she pulls away from Kinesias with the line, “Now: about that truce.” This devious sexual warfare is Lysia’s invention—a way of taking vicarious revenge on Nico for abandoning her earlier in the opera when this number is introduced.   

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Laquita Mithcell (Myrrhine), Joshua Hopkins (Kinesias)

“When will all this end?” Theme

This is, by far, the most fascinating thematic transformation in Adamo’s score. Throughout the opera, characters invoke Ares and Aphrodite, begging the gods of war and love to tell them, “When will all this end?” This phrase consistently reappears on the same four-note motive: fa-mi-do-re. While the men take up the theme in Act II in reference to the sex strike, it’s most often sung by the women as a desperate prayer to end the war. During the celebration, when Kinesias and Leonidas stab one another, Kleonike’s anguished statement of the theme rises above the ensemble’s cries of “war.” This time, however, Ares and Aphrodite actually heed her prayer and materialize for the “Dei ex Machina.”

 

In response to the question “When will all this end?,” the deities offer a troubling answer: “Never will it end.” It’s sung on the same four-note motive, which becomes the basis of a passacaglia. This baroque compositional form is characterized by an instrumental bassline that cycles over and over—the most famous example in the operatic repertoire is the heartbreaking “Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. In Adamo’s passacaglia, however, the pattern (which can be referred to as an “ostinato” or a “ground”) is moved from the bassline to Ares and Aphrodite’s vocal lines. The passacaglia form becomes the perfect vehicle to musically illustrate the phrase “Never will it end,” which repeats endlessly in the number.

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Myrna Paris (Kleonike), Chad Shelton (Nico), Nicholas Phan (Ares), Emily Pulley (Lysia), Heidi Stober (Aphrodite), Victoria Livengood (Lampito)

Based on the warnings and admonitions that Ares and Aphrodite throw in between repetitions of the theme, we might take Adamo’s passacaglia one of two ways. The bleaker interpretation is to regard the phrase “Never will it end” as a given fact that can’t be changed. Conflict is simply an inherent part of human nature, and war is unavoidable. But Adamo also seems to hint at a more hopeful reading with lines like “Do you long to love?” From this perspective, the passacaglia is more a call to action for the audience. While the deities clean up the Greeks’ mess in one magic wave of their hands, the real labor of peace is left to the public.

 

The Greeks’ final chorus, while seemingly triumphant, really functions more like a question-mark at the end of the opera. Amidst shouts of “Evoe!” (an exclamation of Dionysian ecstasy), the “Never will it end” motive intrudes ominously in the orchestra, marked “Bitter, glorious.” It’s an ambiguous conclusion to a brilliant comedic work that, rather than naïvely trumpeting the same empty clichés, poses a challenge to peace-seeking audiences.

about the author
Joe Cadagin
Joe Cadagin is the Audience Education and Communications Manager at Houston Grand Opera.