I have not read the original novel, but I saw that movie that everyone loved last year and now I've seen this opera and once I read a New Yorker article about Alcott's context and the cultural impact of her work. I ask you: shouldn't all that count as reading the book? Close enough, you know? That's what I think.
Anyway: it's Meg, the domestic one! Jo, the one who writes! Amy, the one who draws! And Beth, the one who has no personality and dies! They have vicissitudes, and the ones who don't die end up married. I know that sounds flip, but I actually found myself appreciating the story in a way that I didn't from the movie. Maybe I'm just biased in favor of opera, but I liked this more.
Of course, trying to talk about story in an opera somehow divorced of the music doesn't makes much sense, even though I do it all the time. But seriously: part of the reason the story works to well here...well, the fact that Adamo's own semi-rhyming libretto is so good certainly doesn't hurt (it very effectively makes use of quick cuts between characters in different physical locations), but the music itself is really stunning. Music and words and story all come together beautifully, as you would hope for in an opera. Great romantic music, reminding me sometimes of Barber's Vanessa; in particular, there's a spine-tinginling climactic quartet that strongly made me think of "To leave, to break," although obviously this opera's in a more realistic mold than that one. By eyes may have welled up a few times.
There's a 2001 production from Houston Grand Opera that you can watch--and why wouldn't you? The biggest name in it by a wide margin is Joyce DiDonato as Meg; she's good, of course, but Stephanie Novacek as Jo steals the show, although as so often the case, I feel I may just be saying that because it's the best role.
I have a few issues, which may be more criticisms of the book than the opera per se; I don't know. But: as I said, Jo is really the main character, which I guess is fine, but it feels a little unbalanced: Meg in particular more or less drops out of the picture after getting married near the beginning. There's not even any kind of reconciliation scene between her and Jo, which seems odd to me. And Beth really is a non-entity. And then there's ol' Friedrich, the German tutor whom Jo marries at the end: the question of whether or not she should marry him was very controversial at the time, and no one seems to be able to handle it well: the movie addressed the problem by making him younger and hotter than he would've been in the original and then--apparently not confident that that was sufficient--adding extremely ill-advised metafictional elements to makes us doubt whether we're meant to take this whole thing seriously. This doesn't screw up that badly, but it doesn't do particularly well either: after the aforementioned final quartet between the sisters, he just appears in the last, like, two minutes of the piece, and you think, you know, I really wouldn't have objected if the libretto had just forgotten about him. But I suppose it's a hard problem to solve.
Anyway, seeing great American operas is the only thing that makes me proud of my country these days, so cheers to that. If I met Adamo, I would...I was seriously going to write "shake his hand" here before I realized that I never want to ever shake anyone's hand again. Jeez. He's written other operas, but this his first seems to be the only one to have entered the repertoire, and I can find no way to see any of the others. If you find one, please let me know.
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