559258bk Adamo:570034bk Hasse 1/9/09 6:05 PM Page 8 Advent as I sat in Most Holy Redeemer SINGER The life we have is very great; Church. The life we are to see AMERICAN CLASSICS Surpasses it because we know SINGER Co-workers. Strangers. Teen-agers. It is infinity. Pensioners. They washed his dishes. But when all space has been beheld VOICE A black man in a checkered sports coat. The And all dominion shown; pink-haired punkess with a jewel in her nose. The smallest human heart’s extent MARK ADAMO The gay couple in middle age. Reduces it to none. SINGER They kissed her on his lips, where once there VOICE These learned to love what is corruptible, Late Victorians were lips. They kissed her on his lips. while I, I, I, I shift my tailbone upon the cold, hard pew. VOICE These know the weight of bodies. Regina Coeli • Alcott Music Finale: Orchestra. Overture to Lysistrata * “Late Victorians” by Richard Rodriguez. Copyright © 1990 by Richard Rodriguez. Originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine (October 1990). By permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. Emily Pulley • Andrew Sullivan • Dotian Levalier Mark Adamo Eclipse Chamber Orchestra • Sylvia Alimena Mark Adamo’s most recent première is Four Angels: Concerto for Harp and Orchestra, introduced by the National Symphony Orchestra in June 2007. His second opera, Lysistrata: or, The Nude Goddess, bowed in March 2006 at New York City Opera, at which Adamo served five years as composer-in-residence. Lysistrata was commissioned and introduced by Houston Grand Opera for its fiftieth season in March 2005. Since its 1998 première, also by Houston Grand Opera, Little Women, the first opera for which Adamo composed both music and libretto, has been nationally telecast on the PBS series Great Performances, released on CD by Ondine Records, and heard in over sixty engagements from New York to Mexico City, Minneapolis, Adelaide, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo. Choral works include Cantate Domino, for the Choral Arts Society of Washington; Garland, for C Francisco Nuñez and the Young People’s Chorus of New York, introduced in 2006; and Supreme Virtue, released on CD by M Seattle’s Esoterics in spring 2008. www.markadamo.com Y Photo by Martin Gram K 8.559258 8 559258bk Adamo:570034bk Hasse 1/9/09 6:05 PM Page 2 Mark Adamo (b. 1962) VOICE If he’s lucky, he’s got a year, a doctor told VOICE Brenda. Pat. Connie. Soledad. me. If not, he’s got two. Late Victorians • Regina Coeli • Alcott Music • Overture to Lysistrata SINGER And then, reluctant, turn away Late Victorians incorporated a small staging joke. He meant to remind his SINGER Crumbling is not an instant’s act, To con thee o’er and o’er, I could not write. I had been asked to write: the project was patron prince that the musicians he was keeping in his A fundamental pause; And blame the scanty love to be a set of songs for mezzo-soprano. But I could not country palace very much wanted – and deserved – to return Dilapidation’s processes We were content to show, write. to town. So Haydn wrote a last movement in which, person Are organized decays. VOICE “Lovingly cared for by the staff of Coming We – I and thirty other people from my church, an ad- by person, section by section, the musicians left the stage, ’T’is first a cobweb on the soul, Home Hospice.” hoc hospice – had just buried Bob, a man we hardly knew leaving only two violinists to carry on the song in a bare A cuticle of dust; until he fell ill with AIDS. And Don, whom I had just forest of music stands. A borer in the axis SINGER Augmented, sweet, a hundredfold directed in an opera, was failing. It played as a joke in 1732. But it seemed very different An elemental rust. If thou wouldst take it now. The thing that seemed unacceptable to me was how to me now. ordinary this was all becoming. Ruin is formal, devil’s work Consecutive and slow; Variation: Orchestra. “We have grown accustomed to figures disappearing I ended up writing something quite else for the song Fall in an instant no man did. Cadenza: Horn. from the landscape. Does this not lead us to interrogate cycle. But another piece – this piece – had found shape. I Slipping is crash’s law. the landscape?” – Richard Rodriguez, Late Victorians started sketching it at once, and completed it in the winter IV. Late Victorians, an essay Richard Rodriguez wrote for of 1994. The formal, oblique Rodriguez text would be Variation: Orchestra. Chorale: Orchestra. Harper’s, October 1990, is a memoir of San Francisco in spoken. Four Dickinson poems, singing everything the Cadenza: Violin and Viola. the first years of the plague. A central image was the Rodriguez would not say, would be sung. And the four VOICE Sometimes no family came. Or parents came Victorian house: those “painted lady” Victorians that waves movements would be linked by solo cadenzas written for III. but left without reconciliation, some of San Franciscans had reclaimed, had refurbished, and players from each choir of the orchestra, after which they preferring to say cancer. were now leaving empty as AIDS swept the city. The once- would leave the stage. VOICE I stood aloof at Cesar’s memorial service: the haunted houses were becoming haunted once again. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but now it seems to me kind of party he would enjoy, everybody said. SINGER But others came. I carried that essay with me everywhere the winter of that Late Victorians formally resembles nothing so much And so, for a time, Cesar lay improperly 1992. But I couldn’t set it. It was too long: too much. I as the Stations of the Cross. In the Catholic churches I knew buried in the conditional: VOICE But others came. didn’t want to write this experience. I didn’t recall choosing growing up, you will often find twelve friezes, or to witness it. sculptures, representing Christ’s journey to Calvary and, SINGER Would enjoy, everybody said. SINGER They walked his dog. They washed his dishes. I needed to write this song cycle, and I could not. beyond, to transformation. During Lent, the faithful walk VOICE … What else could they say? Cesar had no VOICE Nurses, nuns. The couple from next door. from frieze to frieze; meditate upon the image; and move religion beyond aesthetic bravery. What else I reread Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, particularly on to the next. They make a kind of living rosary. The could they say? SINGER They washed his dishes. They walked her its chapter on Emily Dickinson. Paglia’s take on Dickinson images themselves are static: mere panels. Jesus falls the dog. They bought her groceries. They was violently different from anything I’d read before. For first time. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. It is the pilgrim SINGER We cover thee, sweet face massaged her poor back. the first time I saw an icy glee, a perverse refusal to look who is dynamic, making the journey from image to image, Not that we tire of thee, away, in a quatrain such as walking the walk. It is in the heart of the pilgrim that the But that thyself fatigue of us; VOICE Co-workers. Strangers. Teen-agers. Pensioners. experience builds. Ruin is formal, devil’s work Late Victorians is meant in tribute to the living and in VOICE The phone rang. And rang again. Michael. SINGER They washed his dishes. They wiped his tears. Consecutive and slow; memory of the dead. I owe a debt of gratitude to Sylvia Paul. Adrian: well, what he’d thought were They wiped his ass. They kissed him on his Fall in an instant no man did; Alimena, to Kent Ashcraft, to James Petosa, and to the men shingles … lips, where once there were lips. Slipping is crash’s law. and women of Eclipse Chamber Orchestra. And the score That season The Washington Post asked me to review is dedicated to the memories of the thousands of the fallen, SINGER Remember, as thou flee VOICE And the saints of this city have named listed the National Chamber Orchestra’s performance of a famed particularly to those of Michael Patterson, Bob Williams, We follow thee until in the phone book, names I heard called Haydn symphony, the “Farewell.” In it, Haydn had Raymond Davila, and Donald Poe. Thou notice us no more; through a microphone one cold Sunday in 8.559258 2 7 8.559258 559258bk Adamo:570034bk Hasse 1/9/09 6:05 PM Page 6 Late Victorians Regina Coeli the orchestra is the only voice you have. No wonder it had Music for speaking voice, singing voice, instrumental soloists, and chamber orchestra by Mark Adamo. Regina Coeli is the slow movement, here rescored for been so hard to make an orchestral piece out of an anti- Text* by Richard Rodriguez, from his book Days of Obligation. Poems (italicised) by Emily Dickinson. strings alone, of Four Angels: Concerto for Harp and orchestral score! Orchestra, each movement of which presents the same Recognizing the problems gets you halfway to the theme in a different guise. Regina Coeli meditates on Mary, solutions. I cut one entire movement of Alcott Portraits, I. SINGER Is Heaven a physician? mother of Jesus. In Roman Catholicism, she is considered and omitted from those remaining the twelve-tone music They say that He can heal; the Angelic Queen who, at the hour of her death, was from which I’d made the opera’s recitative: divorced from VOICE Nineteen eighty-nine.