This interview was originally recorded on August 14th, 2024.
The Oral History Project is supported by the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation.

Mark Adamo, composer and librettist 

Composer-librettist Mark Adamo first attracted national attention with his celebrated debut opera, Little Women, after the Alcott novel. Introduced by Houston Grand Opera in 1998, Little Women is one of the most frequently performed American operas of the last 15 years, with more than 135 national and international engagements. Adamo has gone on to write the operas Lysistrata (2005), The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (2011), and Becoming Santa Claus (2015). He also wrote the libretto for The Lord of Cries — composed by his spouse, John Corigliano — which premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 2021. From 2001 to 2006, Adamo was composer-in-residence at New York City Opera, where he led the VOX: Showcasing American Composers program. Since 2007, he has served as the principal teacher of American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program, in which he coaches teams of composers and librettists in developing their works for the stage. While Adamo's principal work continues to be for the opera house, over the past five years he has ventured not only into chamber music but also into symphonic and choral composition. Adamo began his education at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and went on to earn a Bachelor of Music in composition from Catholic University of America in 1990.

Transcript

Marc A. Scorca: Mark Adamo, thank you so much for being with us today, and to approach the twilight of the summer with a contribution to our Oral History. I'm really grateful.

Mark Adamo: I am happy to be here. Thank you, sir.

Marc A. Scorca: We always start conversations with a question, that is: who brought you to your first opera?

Mark Adamo: Well, does PBS count? Because when I was a kid growing up, my family would crowd around the television in the family room, watching whatever detective fiction they were watching. And if there were operas on PBS, as there were in those years, (and still are, I'm sure) but I remember seeing Daughter of the Regiment with Beverly Sills. I remember seeing Elektra with Birgit Nilsson. Dialogues of the Carmelites, thank you very much, with Jessye Norman. Now, I hasten to add, I never got through any of them, and because I was a kid, and possibly because I was encountering opera for the first time through television, which has not always been its best friend, I remember thinking, "Why are they mugging so much when the camera is right there? Why are they being so excessive in their production of sound?" Also, because the microphone is right there. And I didn't know enough about the form to parse the German-ness of Elektra, or the Italian-ness of Daughter of the Regiment. But it's curious in retrospect, because while I had never had any ambition, in those years, to join that art form, it always seemed to me that it was a nut that I wanted to crack. I feel like I want to understand how this works. I don't know why I don't, because the musical theater was so intelligent to me. I'm sorry, what 12-year-old suburban kid is going to get Elektra, you know, uneducated?

Marc A. Scorca: Let me adjust the question. When is the first time opera transported you?

Mark Adamo: It was the opening night of a production of The Saint of Bleecker Street in Washington, which was conducted by Steve (Steven) Mercurio, and I believe it was a Gian Carlo Menotti production, although it was remounted by Roman Terlecki, who was principal attendant in those years. Again, still not thinking of myself as an opera composer, I was at Catholic University in DC, in order in those years to become overeducated as a theater composer. So, the idea was, I would acquire the skills, so if God willing, I would at some point be able to work with Jonathan Tunick, I would not ask the stupid question, "But why can't the violin play a low F sharp?" It was really acquiring the skills of a concert composer, but with the goal of being a theater composer. And it so happened, really through various reasons that we lucked into these two opening night tickets to this production, and we were in, I don't know, row K - it was beautiful seats, and Saint of Bleecker Street. Now, John and I go back and forth about this. He thinks the whole thing is a masterpiece, and I think the first act is a masterpiece. However, it was the first time that I heard something in English that was not trying to be a Broadway musical in its attitudinizing; it was quite naturalistic in its acting but was still somewhat conversant with immediacy of musical theater writing - the rhythmic treatment, the treatment of the English language. And I remember going up the aisle, speaking to my friends, saying "Well, if this is what opera is, I will be totally here. This is completely my world". That was the first time that I thought that there might be a place for what I did in that genre.

Marc A. Scorca: And you may have just answered the question I was going to ask, because early on, your first honor was as a playwright, and as a composer, your early work was choral writing.

Mark Adamo: Right out of college; exactly.

Marc A. Scorca: So there are pieces here, but was it this performance that made you realize "Opera is how I need to pull this all together as the thing I do?"

Mark Adamo: No, I wish I could say that; that would be such a neat story, but that was not the case. I was still thinking that I was going to acquire all of these ancillary skills and then go to New York and assume the mantle of Stephen Sondheim. That was the thing. The gift of my - forgive this word - journey was that the more I did all these other things, (which I thought would be ancillary), the more I loved all of them. I think of myself as wanting to be a theater composer, who did his own choral arrangements, but the more I wrote for chorus, the more I loved that. The more I wrote for orchestra as part of my conservatory training, the more I loved that as well. And so, little by little, I thought, "Oh, Bernstein collaborated on the orchestrations of West Side Story with Hershy Kay". I started to think, "Well" - without putting language to this exactly - the more I thought "Maybe I can do the work of an opera composer nonetheless in a theatrical context. Although this might be interesting, because the more I went into musical theater, the more I was drawn to the more operatic examples of musical theater. So, I wanted to write Sweeney Todd, and not so much Company. I wanted to write Candide and not so much Wonderful Town. I wanted to write Porgy and Bess, or Of Thee I Sing, and not so much - they all changed titles in those years. So, I think I was verging towards opera without quite knowing it. But the first time that I engaged (with) the problem, was when Summer Opera Theater Company, which was associated with Catholic University, from which I matriculated, had said they would like to do an opera on Little Women. And because my first orchestra piece had just gone up a few months earlier, and that was the first time I thought, "Maybe you're not just a theater composer who has acquired other skills". It was the first time that I tried to write a quote unquote 'concert piece', and it played like a concert piece. So, even I was surprised at that. That came not so much from the idea of doing something symphonic, but an orchestra had asked me, and it was the AIDS epidemic, and so it was as much an emotional project as an artistic project. But it was true that after that piece, which was a 27-minute hybrid really, of the Haydn Farewell Symphony and a cantata. It was very much in a concert world. And I thought, "You know, it is possible that you might not know best where you belong artistically, because that just happened there. And then the Little Women offer happened. "Well, I'll try. I can't write an opera, but I've had my musical theater training. I've now had my concert training. Let me try to combine them in some way." And I had heard, as I told you, the Menotti performance at that point. Honestly, I thought when the project began, "Let me do the best I possibly can, and the worst that will happen is maybe there are 20 good minutes in it". But then the deeper I went into it, then I thought, "Oh, no, I know exactly how this should go, and I know exactly what should happen". Then the joke was that the original company that commissioned it said, "Well, no, that's too much, that's too radical". So, this is a project again, that I had not pursued, and when I dug into it, I thought, "No, I have this completed".

Marc A. Scorca: I think of Little Women, and I will call this among the cluster of what I'll call 'pivotal' operas. And there isn't a moment in time, I think there's a period of time, when a group of successful new operas moved new opera from the periphery into the mainstream. And I think of Little Women as a real key there, because so many companies performed it; because you were such an ambassador for it, and by extension for new opera. And suddenly the dam was broken open where companies could feel comfortable, where audiences could feel comfortable in approaching new opera. And that may be a retrospective observation. But I'm curious, in those years of the mid to late 1990's, were you aware that you were really breaking through here? What was the environment like for new opera at that time? And how did you see yourself transforming it?

Mark Adamo: Well, again, I would love to claim retroactive intuition. I didn't. The closest that I came to thinking about that was when I had gone to Houston Grand Opera as a journalist and had covered the world premiere of Harvey Milk by Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie, and I really wanted to hear it. And I didn't exactly blackmail The Washington Post, but I had to say, "Here's the whole press list. Everybody else is going, but we're not". And so, I got the assignment, and that, like the Menotti, was the first time that I had seen something that seemed at once, so completely operatic and so contemporary. But in writing my own show, honestly, I was trying not to be embarrassing. I was trying to be as good as I possibly could be. I did not have a sense that any company other really than Houston Grand Opera was doing commissioning, because I mean Houston Grand Opera for many years was unique. They did something every year, every other year for the young artists. They commissioned Bernstein's A Quiet Place. They commissioned a Glass, they commissioned the Monk, all of that. But they were the outlier. I mean, if you did, Susannah, that was your gesture towards the contemporary, which at that point was 60 years old. I am happy to record, I guess in retrospect, if I had thought of what was happening in the world artistically, I might have been more self-conscious. But I just thought, "Let's see if I can bring everything I've ever learned as a librettist and a lyricist from the theater side; as a concert composer from the concert side. And let me see if I can't get this particular vision onto the stage in a way that would be not necessarily familiar, but intelligible. The things that I ended up talking about a lot in those years, because it's a very eclectic score. A lot of the recitative is undergirded by 12 tone rows that would not have been unfamiliar to the ears of Alban Berg, although I would've flunked actually the 12 tone test, because they're applied triads and thirds and all of that. So as a 12 tone row, it's terrible. But as a way of organizing chromaticism, which is what I needed it to do, to keep at a certain distance from key, so that when E Major came in, you heard the difference. It worked beautifully for me. There were all sorts of things in it. But I did work very hard to make sure that those shifts among idioms were not arbitrary. You were in a non-triadic harmonic world, and there was a reason for that. If you went to E Major, there was a reason for that. If you went to whole tones, there was also a reason for that. But the leap of faith that I took, and this was simply borne out by my own experience as a listener, that I thought, "I don't think that an audience is going to be there counting pitches in any given harmonic context. They are going to be asking, 'Is it intelligible? Do you believe that utterance? Do you believe that gesture?'" And so, Susan Feder, who has since retired from The Mellon Foundation, but was then leading Schirmer, with which I had no relationship at the time, but my beloved did. But as a courtesy to him, she came to Houston and heard it. And the week before, she says, "How are you feeling?" And I said, "I'm good". And she said, "Your first opera is opening. No one feels good; that's not, like, credible". But I said, "No, actually I do, because I feel like we've gotten the truth of the piece onto the page. And the singers have gotten the truth of the piece off the page and into the room. So now the X Factor is the audience. Is the piece going to make the leap that I think that it can, as a written piece, and now as a performance piece?"

Marc A. Scorca: And which it did.

Mark Adamo: Which it did.

Marc A. Scorca: Again, What is it? You're up over 125 productions of it, I think.

Mark Adamo: It's a lot. It's never left the stage. It left the stage for Covid. It's in Vienna now. It's going to Fort Worth again. I think the second time they've done it.

Marc A. Scorca: And that's what I mean by by being one of those pivot operas, where it suddenly became almost the thing to do, to produce your work. Every company was gonna produce the work.

Mark Adamo: Well, there are couple of stories. There were certain companies that were saying, "It's outselling Bohème; that doesn't happen". And I thought, of course, in my view, I thought, "That's what should happen". Because Bohème was a new piece once upon a time. But to your point, it's not just my piece. I mean, Dead Man Walking was one of these pieces.

Marc A. Scorca: Right. Dead Man Walking is another one, and part of it is the degree to which you have been a spokesperson for your work in the way Jake (Heggie) is a spokesperson for his work and the way Carlisle was. Carlisle Floyd went to virtually every production of Susannah and Of Mice and Men, just giving a face, giving a person to this new work. And it just broke the ice so beautifully.

Mark Adamo: I sometimes lose sight of how exotic a new opera or a living composer can be to traditional audience. I mean, even after Little Women happened, and people would ask what I was doing. I said, "I'm this opera composer". And, inevitably they would say, "Oh, is it that in English?" And I think this has changed quite dramatically. Look at the Met's programming now. The Met has finally kind of come to understand what opera as an art form is.

Marc A. Scorca: Absolutely.

Mark Adamo: But many people thought opera is long ago, and far away.

Marc A. Scorca: It's 25, 30 years after your pivotal work that began this incredible flowering of American opera.

Mark Adamo: I would argue, - now, of course, I am married to the guy, so, I can't be completely objective - I think The Ghosts of Versailles also.

Marc A. Scorca: You're talking about one of my favorite operas.

Mark Adamo: I applaud your choice.

Marc A. Scorca: But I will say, and with all due respect and affection for the divine John Corigliano, it wasn't a work that a lot of opera companies could produce, the way Little Women was. So, despite its tremendous intrinsic merit, and I love the piece (I was just watching a piece of it on video the other day), yours had the added value, if you will, of being performable by so many companies.

Mark Adamo: It was small in scale. Also, let's not be disingenuous here, there is the small matter of the title. It has a title that is extremely familiar. So, the effect was people might go to see everyone's opera on Little Women because "Oh hey, Little Women". And then at the end of it might say, as I said with the Menotti, "Oh, if this is what contemporary opera in English can do - hey, let's go to the next piece".

Marc A. Scorca: Precisely.

Mark Adamo: And I'm happy to report that Lysistrata...I had a conversation with the artistic administrator of the City Opera in the years that it was being co-produced. And he was quite surprised that Lysistrata was outselling Carmen, because I mean, his sensibility was much more towards the traditional. Absolutely no shade/gas there. But he was surprised. "We have this beautiful mezzo. It's her role debut. It's her New York debut. The production is great. More people are going to your show. How does that work?" Now, again, privately, 'cause I had a very friendly relationship with him, and it was not expressed angrily. But privately, I thought, "Well, because everybody knows Carmen enough already, and Carmen in its time was a contemporary piece".

Marc A. Scorca: Yeah, absolutely. And I love Lysistrata, so thank you for that.

Mark Adamo: You know, it's being recorded. We're getting a performance and a recording in February. Gil Rose.

Marc A. Scorca: I did not. Oh, fantastic.

Mark Adamo: Well, it's the piece that is not recorded. So I'm over the moon.

Marc A. Scorca: So let me say this. I refer to you as a creator rather than a composer, because your skill is equally deployed between libretto-writing and composing. Like Carlisle Floyd, like Richard Wagner, there are others. But it is fairly rare in opera. And I was thinking, there is that moment in opera when the librettist delivers the libretto to the composer. When you are the librettist, what is that moment of delivery like? Or is there a moment of delivery?

Mark Adamo: There isn't. The short answer is B, because what I do and what I teach is a rather elaborate series of outlines. That is to say, the first question I ask is: what is this piece about? If you're drawn to a subject, if you're drawn to a character and you think, "I'd like to make an evening on this subject for this character", the first thing you ask is why? Why is this better than silence? Why are we going to leave Netflix and go to the theater and explore with the creator something that you cannot explore elsewhere? So that becomes kind of an essay, that was an essay on Little Women. Actually, I believe it was you who asked me to do the course on Little Women. And I said, "Well, I have this essay", and it became four more essays, and that became the course. But with all of the shows I've written so far, there's always been, and as much for me as for anybody else - what are we doing here? What do we need, say from Dracula in 2021? What do we need from Lysistrata in 2004? What do these projects, whether they're plays or pre-existing characters, what do they have to offer us, as a contemporary audience? And then I do two things, once I come up with an answer to that question. Maybe Little Women is about what happens when no one is trying to abandon you, but things can't help but change; that sense that for good or ill, you are always going to outgrow a relationship, or a relationship is going to outgrow you, which - when I came on that - I thought, "That's a story that everyone I've ever known has experienced". I won't go through all of them, but Lysistrata had an answer to that question; Mary Magdalene had an answer to that question. But then once you have that in your sights, I do two things. And this, I developed on Little Women simply because I was terrified of getting it wrong. I thought, "Let me see if I can just get this to a summary as soon as possible", so that I can rewrite something that's 13 pages long, rather than just lunge in the direction of act one piano vocal, and then only realize at the end of 200 pages music that you've gotten something wrong. So, the first outline is what I call the silent movie outline, or the narrative ballet outline where, you're thinking, "If the opera's already written and you're seeing it, but you can't hear it, you're deaf, and you don't really have any access to language, what is the body language of the performers telling you about the story that you think you want to tell, based on that first essay that you wrote that talks about what the thing is about?" And that has been an extremely useful tool to me. And the good thing is, is that you can send it to all of your playwright, screenwriter, dramaturg friends, because they can see that it's actually not dissimilar to the treatment of a film. And so, generally what I do is say, "Look, I'm not gonna tell you the story that I want to tell. I'm just going to send you what I've written, and you tell me the story you think that I'm telling". And that goes through any number of drafts. And the great thing about that, as a composer, is that there are certain actions. There's dramatic actions that are not tied to language. They're not tied to anything other than the actor's intention that you see can recur. And my composer brain thought, "That might comprise the makings of a symphonic plot". And then, you put that outline aside, and then the other outline that I do, is what I call the CD outline. And you're lying on your window seat with your headphones, and you're hearing the music that's already written, but you don't speak the language. So all you're hearing is vocal gesture; all you're hearing is orchestral gesture. And so what can that tell you, based on that first outline? Because now you know how the actors are embodying the story. And now the question that you're asking yourself is, how do those actions sound if you have, in something like Little Women, this oral equivalent of a CBS snapshot? Well, that can't develop, can it, because the whole point of it, is this doesn't change. Whereas if you are in Lysistrata, and you've got this kind of musical moment that is designed to recruit, if you will, well, that can mean one thing if it's an aria of seduction. And it can mean another thing if it's a soldier's drill. But the action is consistent and therefore, what you can do as a composer is make that same action sound one way when it's a bedroom scene and sound another way when it's on a battle. So, you do that. Then when you make the libretto, the libretto is already kind of informed by your idea of what the score is going to be. So to answer your question, the first draft of the libretto is the first draft of the libretto, but it's also kind of the first draft of the score. You haven't thought of the words first and then the music, or for that matter, the music first and then the words. You've thought about the actions first, and then how the words and the music can combine. So that's why the first draft of the libretto isn't just language, even though there's no music yet.

Marc A. Scorca: That's such a wonderful thought that you just explained, and sometimes operas are strengthened by the crucible of debate that might go on between the composer and the librettist. And I hear you being a very critical listener of your own work.

Mark Adamo: I'm afraid so. For good or ill. There's a lot of that.

Marc A. Scorca: Do you then depend somewhat more on a stage director, or another outside voice, to have that debate with you, (one) that a composer and librettist might have between them?

Mark Adamo: I don't, and I think the advantage that I have, in being the whole team, is that I sort of workshop it amongst myselves. But the other thing, as I mentioned earlier, when I get that first outline, it's very few people who can deal with musical outline and hear anything. But there are directors, there are playwrights there, and John (Corigliano) is very good at this. When I get that first outline to a point that I think is as clear as possible, then you send it to all the smart people who will take your calls, and see what they think. I realize I'm adopting a somewhat controversial position in our field, insofar as...at one point, I was talking to a group of students and I said, "Look, as time goes on, the idea is that you will need a workshop less and less, if not at all". And I had a colleague who I thought was absolutely going to unsheathe a dagger from her right boot and lunge across the table. Now, she was a dramaturge, and a very good one, excellent. Nonetheless, I stand by the point that certainly early in your career, if you don't know what it is that opera does, if you are unsure of your own operatic practice, sure. Talk to every smart people who will take your calls. And that can happen in a workshop with directors, with actors. And I still feel like the skills to produce a very precise version of your vision upfront are learnable. And I guess I may be oversensitive to this, but I feel like if I am in a room, it is not incumbent on me to ask other people to solve my writing problems, what it is that I'm doing. I'm on opera number six now. If I am presenting a first draft that is landing in the vicinity of an experience, it's hard for me to feel good about that. Now, friends of ours in musical theater will argue the opposite side of this, but the musical theater has always historically been a collaborative form - the book writer and the songwriters, plural, often the composer and lyricist...there's this sense of everybody's in the mill together. And maybe because I am a composer and a playwright and a lyricist who has also directed...maybe precisely because I have studied all those skills, and I have had the experiences that I have had...I have to tell you about this. There have been so few changes that I have made from the first reading of anything to the first tech. That's why I feel like it's learnable. It's not like I'm this, you know, genius who has ascended from the heavens, because I studied these things.

Marc A. Scorca: And I wanted to take up on that. So, in the old days of City Opera, you were a composer-in-residence, and that was when City Opera was doing 12, 14 titles a year. What was the benefit to you of being a multi-year composer-in-residence? What was the benefit to the opera company of having a composer-in-residence?

Mark Adamo: My principal brief at City Opera was to lead what I renamed as the Vox program, which was a workshop of new or new-ish or unproduced American operas that we would do with orchestra and expose the audience to it. So for me, the delight was wading through often north of 100-120 scores that would be submitted, and then shepherding them through readings. So, you got this sense of what was out there, what stories people were interested in, how they were treating them. It's a huge, huge range of creative approaches. And I mean, it was a lot. A hundred scores is a lot. And I do feel very strongly that if you are on a panel, if you are in a position like the one that I was in, you read everything; you don't read the first five pages. I think our deadline was May, and very often in the guest room, there would be banker's boxes of scores. This is my next month. So that was helpful to me. But I think that it strengthened, and I wouldn't say initiated, because City Opera always had a very, very strong connection to new American work. It was the first showcase, I believe, of Carlisle in New York. I think Susannah. Wasn't there a whole Ford Foundation series?

Marc A. Scorca: There was a whole season that was all American opera.

Mark Adamo: Exactly. So you've got Ned Rorem's Miss Julie, and you've got Carlisle, and you've got Robert Ward, all of that. And I like to think that Vox was an honorable successor to that. It was a week or two of workshops. The thinking did not originate (with me). I like to think that Vox strengthens the Opera's position as a conduit to the new, which didn't always mean the youngest composers. David Del Tredici had done an opera. He was doing a whole series of 'Alice' pieces for voice and orchestra, but he had done an opera called Dum Dee Tweedle (also in the Carroll realm), which no one had ever heard. And so we had some very distinguished composers who had made entries into the opera field, which had not been heard. And that was the great delight for me. Here's this new guy, whom you've never heard of. Here's this young woman, whom you've never heard of. Here's this Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, whom you've heard of, but not at the opera house. And let's all together, in this - not artistically casual, they were very carefully prepared, but - in a sort of socially casual exploratory way of saying, "Let's come in and encounter this; let's come and see what can happen with these talents in this context, in this room at this moment.

Marc A. Scorca: From all this experience, you have processed it, organized it, and now teach and mentor and advise. You know, I once asked Carlo this question, and I won't share his answer at the moment, but what is, and you've already alluded to this though, what is teachable? Teachable in creating an opera; teachable in creating in composing; teachable in libretto writing. What can you teach and what must be born in the individual?

Mark Adamo: Well, Marilyn Horne once said, "There is no such thing as a great teacher, and there's no such thing as a great student. What there is, is a great relationship". And there was a poetry teacher that I had in DC who said, "I'm not sure that poetry can be taught, but I know it can be learned". And I think both of those statements are ways into the same observation, which is, that it is much more on the student to be able to be motivated, and be able to listen to what the teacher has to say, than it is on the teacher. I can model ways of thinking. I can model ways of practicing. I can do all sorts of things, actually. But if the student isn't open to it, or interested in it, then nothing's going to happen. It's the cliche of, "What do you mean you're deaf? I am screaming so loudly". So, I try as a teacher, not to say that there is only one way. What I try to do is give, not answers, but useful questions; not solutions, but tools. Here is a way of telling a story. Here's a way that somebody else has tried to tell this exact story. Here are the questions that you can ask, that if you find yourself blocked or merely confused, here are ways that you can train your brain to push yourself into other ways of making art. Now, I think one thing that might be worth noting here is that there are artists of a thousand kinds, but I think two kinds are germane, here. There are artists who feel like it's probably a risky thing to look under the hood. Don't ask yourself too many questions about how you do what you do. Don't disturb the intuitive connection. It's somewhat (a) mystical idea of what makes art work, or what makes an artist possible to make art work. I am here to tell you stoutly, that neither I nor John are in that camp. We like to look under the hood. I have always found it much more stimulating to figure out how things function. You hear a piece of Ravel. How did he get there? How did he get from that chord to this chord? This is a grand comparison, but it seemed to me, in my reading of Verdi's life - the Mary Jane Phillips-Matz biography, of course is indispensable - but he seemed to present himself, maybe a little bit disingenuously, but mostly sincerely, as a craftsman. There are tools that one uses to make something happen. He was apparently in a kind of journalistic war of words with a very subconsciously avantgarde organization, that was prestigious in Italy at the time. And there are editorials that were republished in her biography, in which she was very much saying, "Well, I would argue with these people if I understood what their terms were. But I am just this farmer from Busseto". That's not true. But the notion that you're saying there are ways of looking at what you do that are empirically verifiable, or if not empirically, that at least historically. You can point to ways in which this method of storytelling has been used before in other contexts. When I teach at ALT (American Lyric Theater), I will teach 'Sempre libera' alongside the 'Soliloquy' from Carousel. Because even though there are differences in the approach to voice, and obviously differences in the harmonic world, as solo scenes they're structurally quite similar. And so I feel like that's what you want to put in front of your students. Let's look at these things. Let's look at what's similar. Let's look at what's different. Let's look at how those differences change over time. Speaking of Carlisle, I had a huge - I don't mean argument, exactly - but Carlisle had a very specific idea of what melismatic writing meant in the characterization of operatic personae. Like, if she's a coloratura, she's frivolous. And I said, "Well, it'll come as news to Donizetti, because I think that he thought that Lucia? a rather serious character, and even in Little Women, on which he was a hugely valued advisor, we fought! He did not want the coloratura in the opening couplet. He did not want 'Make the breads'. And I thought, "No, the whole point of defining that first syllable and everything's fine the second time". First it's syllabic, and then it's this huge riff. That's how you know that she is just reproaching herself for being that stupid. I dunno if I won that argument; I think it was draw. But the point is, is the argument is what's important, right? And I think this is also true pedagogically. If you've got a student who disagrees strongly, great. Tell me why. Tell me what your experience is. I remember hearing, the Whitney Houston rendition of 'I Will Always Love You', the Dolly Parton song, I don't know, in the '90's. And I'm thinking, "Why is this scene so familiar?" And I thought it's a Handel aria. Every time the theme comes back, it is more and more vocally elaborated because the feeling demands it, which was the exact opposite of Carlisle's argument, but it was very close to Donizetti or Handel, for that matter. Those are the things. You can put those in front of a classroom of students and they'll get it or they won't. But you can put it out there and then you hope for the best, which is true as an artist as well.

Marc A. Scorca: You mentioned that you're working on your sixth opera. Rigoletto was Verdi's 17th opera, and Don Giovanni was Mozart's 12th, if we discount the unfinished pieces in between. Is there anything more important than just writing it, producing it, seeing it, seeing the audience reaction to it, and moving on to the next one?

Mark Adamo: Well ideally, but we're no longer in the 18th or 19th centuries. We're talking about periods in which opera was much closer to the musical theater. It wasn't exactly commercial. It was at least as much sponsored by the court or the aristocracy, as by the bourgeoisie. But there wasn't really, what I think you called in another context, a churn, which there kind of is now, and I'm ambivalent about that. The good news is there are a lot of young creatives who are being ambitioned, and the bad news is they're not being given a whole lot of time and support. And you have three months and give us 45 minutes and we'll give you two performances and good luck. So that might be worth learning from, but I mean, I'm not entirely sure. Now the more specific answer to your question, is that I would like to think that organizations like American Lyric Theater or the apprentice programs that you get in Washington or in Chicago, where young operatic artists are learning the skills on a smaller scale. You do a 15 minute opera, you do a 20 minute opera - you've got some kind of laboratory. I would like to think that you would not have to write 12 full-length operas in order to get to your first good one, because who wants that, right? I mean, life is too short, particularly now when opera is already off to the ride. It's not part of show business, exactly. On the other hand - now, again, I don't know if I'm the best person to whom to address this question, because in sensibility, I grew up in the American theater. I grew up in the notion that things were improved out of town, so there's a certain preciousness that I never had. I never thought that my first draft was the only draft. The only thing that I thought was that I should not ask other people to weigh in on my first draft. The first draft that I'm going to present to you is gonna be draft number 12. That's the thing that I would like to, if you will, arm students with: that you are able to workshop it amongst yourselves as creatives, amongst your supportive circle of other artist colleagues, so that by the time you get in to a workshop, and let us remember that a workshop is only as good as its participants. You can have a director, a dramaturge there, but what if they're no good? Or to be kinder about it, what if they are good, but not suited to what you are doing? So, that's why I feel like the people who study with me, I feel like I want you to ask ...Hal Prince used to say, of the theater, "You go into the first preview thinking that the show is perfect, that you have looked at every bar and every line, and that it's unimprovable, and then you get it on the road. And then you realize how it's gonna be improved". But do not, oh please do not, I beg anybody who has ever or will ever study with me, do not come into our house saying, "Well, it's kind of like this". No, don't do that. Because you don't have to do that as a writer. And show up. I wouldn't be quite so vehement about this, if it hadn't been my own experience with Becoming Santa Claus. There was one big change, and I suggested it. I was having a reading of the libretto with the producer and the director and the designer. And we got to the end of the second scene and I said, "You know, can we pause for a second, because like every time I get to this point in the libretto, I feel like I need a moment for Queen Sophine. We have never seen her alone. We have never seen her not reacting to other characters, and she is having this huge crisis of parental confidence. And I've always resisted writing it, 'cause I thought the show would get too dark, but as a dramatist, I feel like she needs this as a character, does anybody disagree?" And they said, "No, that's great; go". And that was it. And so, I'm completely happy to take that endorsement, but the point was, it was one; everything else had been solved. Now again, and I really don't mean to disrespect the many very serious artists who are working as dramaturges. I do not want to disrespect the workshop process. But I think that it is possible to respect that, and also to say that, as writers, particularly the longer you go in this art form, that you should be able to need it less and less. That's the dream, anyway.

Marc A. Scorca: That leans into to my last question in our remaining time today. Aside from 'How do you write a libretto?', How do you set it to music? How do you do word setting?' You must be asked for just career advice - composers, librettists, who want to really have a career, and are just at the dawn of it. What is at the heart of Mark Adamo's career advice to an opera creator?

Mark Adamo: Oh, Marc, I wish I had a smarter answer to this. I don't really, because I won the lottery with Little Women, and Little Women happened, and here I am. So, if I'm hearing you correctly, the idea of how does one make one's way in the business, I've got certain things to offer that I'm sure all sorts of other people have mentioned. But let me, at the risk of seeming rather idealistic, let me pull this back to the artistic, because if you find the thing that you feel that is absolutely yours artistically, that is going to give you the stamina to stay with it, over the now somewhat more extended process of the outline and the workshop and all of this. So again, this is not new, but once you find the thing that you're going to commit to, listen to the part of your brain that says, "This is my show. This is absolutely my show. Only I can do this show". Because that is going to give you, I think, the stamina to go through the increasingly extended process of getting the show onto the stage. And I think, what we were talking about earlier, in terms of specificity of artistic approach, I was talking about that as an artist, but I think that's also good sense as a professional, so that when you show up with...let's say you have the first 20 minutes of this proposed full length thing, but you know what it is; you have thought about it; you have walked around every possible angle, like a sculptor with a block of marble. That cannot but serve you. Let me ask you this question. I mean, when, when you say 'career', can you be more specific about what that means? I mean, in terms of contracts, I also have a publisher.

Marc A. Scorca: It's not so much the tactical, as much as - in a way, you said it - that if you find the material that is yours, being dedicated to it, believing in it, believing in yourself, writing what it is you need to write. If the story is in you to be told, you need to tell it. That sort of Polonius "To thine own self be true" kind-of advice.

Mark Adamo: Right? But that doesn't make it less true.

Marc A. Scorca: Absolutely.

Mark Adamo: Literally now, here's the good news. We're in this golden age of new opera. Everybody's commissioning: small, medium, large. It's all over the place. That was not the case when John was writing The Ghosts of Versailles. That was The Met's first commission in 35 years. It was kind of the case with Little Women in '98, but Houston was the only company committing to that. Now, it's fabulous, right? I mean, I've given in pre-concert speeches: the thing about living through a golden age is that everyone wanders around saying how yellow everything is. So that's swell. But the bad news is there's so much new opera out there. And so if you are going to do something that you believe in, and...the language of posterity, the language of durability. I don't know if that's a trap, or not. I tend to think that it is more than it isn't. But I do think that the language of excellence, language of precision, "Can I get this story in a version that can only be told in this way? And that has been so specific both to my sensibility and to my skills?" Success. What you don't want is, "Oh well, it got on to the stage, but we could've used another two months, and I was busy with other things, and so it's okay, but it's...". Again, particularly in a field like ours, you know, where it's not a commercial field. It's not the Marvel comics universe. I mean, for good or ill, it's still supposed to be part of what art is.

Marc A. Scorca: Well Mark, have you ever, as, in a way, you alluded to this just now, have you ever taken a commission for a work that didn't really interest you, but, "Heck, it's a commission. I'm going to do it".

Mark Adamo: No. I have to say I am very, very grateful to be in that position, and Peggy Monastra, my agent at Schirmer, told me this right after Little Women. This will shock you. (Of course it won't shock you at all). I was getting a lot of offers - projects on a kind of, let's call it an 'Americana' theme. There was going to be a ballet on Gone with the Wind, which I thought was the worst idea possible - this huge thing. There was a great deal of money involved. And I said "But this is the worst idea in life. You can't do this, not now". So there was a lot of that. And Peggy, God, love her, said something which I've never forgotten. She said, "A career is built as much on the no's as the yeses". Again, I've been very fortunate. I've not been pushed that way. But if I can't see my way into it, I don't do it. Because, and I don't mean this to sound Pollyanna-ish, but what if I took something that was reasonably interesting? But if I turned it down, somebody who would say, "That is my show", then that person doesn't get an opportunity to write that show. And I'm doing this because somebody asked me. So it does feel like...I say this quite seriously...I feel like you say yes to the things that are yours. And if they're not yours, let them be available to other people, 'cause they might be theirs.

Marc A. Scorca: That is career advice.

Mark Adamo: Oh, okay. I'll take it.

Marc A. Scorca: That was wonderful.

Mark Adamo: It doesn't feel like career advice. But we're not in the higher earning echelons of show business here. I mean, a lot of us can live very happily, and that's great. We like that. But I do feel, perhaps sentimentally, though I don't think so, if you're doing this thing that we do, you were doing it more idealistically than not. No one started writing opera because they wanted to, I don't know, buy a pool in Malibu. At least, no one I've ever met. You're doing this because you believe that these artists, in this idiom in a map that you make, can tell a kind of truth that the audience who's interested in it, that you cannot get elsewhere. So, to that extent, I think the smartest thing I can tell people professionally is the most passionate thing I can tell people artistically. They're not separated. You know, the most prudent, the canniest, the shrewdest thing that you can do as an artist is Polonius, 'Be true to yourself', 'cause that's the only thing you're going to do well. If you never connect with it, you're never going to be good, has been my experience.

Marc A. Scorca:

Mark Adamo, thank you. I'm so grateful for the insight, for the uplifting thoughts you have, and the tactical advice you give. It's just a pleasure to talk to you.