Renowned Composer-Librettist Mark Adamo Spends Week with NEC Opera Students Workshopping New Opera "Sarah in the Theatre"

New England Conservatory's opera studies department welcomed renowned composer and librettist Mark Adamo to campus for a residency last week. Collaborating with NEC students, Adamo workshopped his new opera, Sarah in the Theatre, a commission for Odyssey Opera about Boston operatic legend and NEC alumna Sarah Caldwell ’46, ’79 hon. DM. The residency culminated Friday evening with a musical reading of Act One of Sarah in the Theatre. 

When Odyssey Opera Founder and Artistic Director Gil Rose approached Joshua Major, NEC's Chair of Opera Studies, with the idea of hosting Adamo to workshop his new opera, Major was thrilled. "Without hesitating, I simply said yes," said Major, who had met Adamo years ago when he directed a production of the composer-librettist's début opera Little Women. "The idea of having Mark on campus to work with our singers was an extraordinary opportunity I couldn't pass up. What an invaluable experience to work with a living composer/librettist!"

Adamo became well-known in 1998 when Little Women, an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's novel, premiered and quickly rose to acclaim. It has remained one of the most frequently performed American operas of the last two decades, with over 100 international productions. Adamo served as a composer-in-residence for New York City Opera from 2001 to 2006 and has enjoyed further operatic successes with works including Lysistrata in 2005, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene in 2013, and Becoming Santa Claus in 2015. His newest opera, Sarah in the Theatre, will premiere in 2025. 

Sarah Caldwell has proven a fascinating subject for Adamo. Born in 1924, the opera director/conductor was a musical prodigy, graduating high school at age 14 and later studying at New England Conservatory. She worked as an assistant at the New England Opera Company for several years and headed the Boston University Opera Workshop from 1952 to 1960. In 1957, she founded the Opera Company of Boston, where her work became so well-known that it led to a TIME magazine cover story in 1975.

"Decades before we were talking about female leaders, anti-racist casting, vivid new art and vital reëxamination of old art, there, alone, strode Sarah Caldwell, creating the opera world in which we all now live," reads a leaflet for Sarah in the Theatre. "But no paragon, Sarah: as abusive as she was inspiring, as haunted as she was fearless, this was a woman — a character — epic in her gifts, her needs, her kindness and her flaws; extraordinary in her work, she was nonetheless haunted, as we all are, the demons in her past."

"The more I looked through it, the more I thought, on the one hand, she was doing all these extraordinarily humane and progressive things on stage while at the same time treating her actual colleagues in the most inhumane ways possible," said Adamo. "As a round character who could be an ottoman of humanistic values on stage and off stage, she never encountered a budget that she couldn't blow through and never encountered an opportunity to pay someone she couldn't avoid." One central question about Sarah Caldwell seems to underlay the opera as a whole: "Once you get rid of that cliche of the artist who has a right to solipsism, what would motivate someone to be so expansive and empowering in an artistic context and the opposite offstage?" 

Early in Adamo's residency, when discussing his goals for the NEC students workshopping Sarah in the Theatre, he remarked on the thoughtful way they were learning his new work. "They're approaching the music extremely respectfully," he said. "I'm not going to expect singers to have done all this research — the usefulness of me being here is that I can give them the frame for the music they're singing. And the more they hear of that, the better they are, which is exciting for me."

"As a teacher coaching singers," he continued, "there is nothing more satisfying than having young artists leave your studio more confident, specific, and richer than when they came into it. The challenge I would like to offer these artists is to assume that every musical choice on the page — every dynamic, every rest, every comma, every crescendo — is there for a reason, a dramatic reason that is being expressed musically."

On Friday evening, audience members gathered in NEC's Plimpton Shattuck Black Box Theatre to watch opera students premiere a draft of Act One of Sarah in the Theatre. "If this reaches you," Adamo addressed the audience, "it is as much to what they have given it as to what I have written." 

"This is phenomenal music, and we had a phenomenal experience with Mark," said cast member and NEC Doctoral student Mary Letellier '25 DMA during a question and answer period following the performance. 

One audience member asked how the cast might relate to Sarah Caldwell's financial struggles as aspiring professional musicians. "If I were pursuing any other career, I wouldn't have moments like this," said Anneke Stern '22, '24 MM, referencing her experience workshopping Sarah in the Theatre with Adamo and her NEC classmates that week. "These moments bring so much happiness and beauty into our lives."

Sarah in the Theatre will premiere with Odyssey Opera in 2025. Learn more about Mark Adamo here.