Odyssey Opera | Adamo's "Lysistrata"

In 2005, composer-librettist Mark Adamo—fresh off his first opera, Little Women—freely adapted, for his second, Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, the 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. “Freely” is the key word here: the composer “…cut all but three scenes of the play, created new male characters, changed the war, and invented a wrangling romance between Lysistrata and the Athenian leader Nico. The opera imagines a woman who, at first, fakes political convictions so as to wreak on her lover an emotional revenge: only later must she ask herself, to whom does she belong, herself or her people? And its 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…