It is the evening before the Metropolitan Opera`s radio-broadcast performance of his new opera, ”The Ghosts of Versailles,” and John Corigliano sounds nothing at all like a man who has just enjoyed the biggest popular success the Met audience has handed a living composer since Samuel Barber`s ”Vanessa” had its premiere there in 1958.
Nervously pacing his handsomely appointed Manhattan apartment, Corigliano confesses he won`t be able to relax until the work has its seventh and final performance (Jan. 10). Between nonstop interviews with the national and international press, and ”fix-it” huddles with members of the production team following each show, the 53-year-old composer looks as if he had a few pesky ghosts of his own yet to be exorcised.
Corigliano`s anxiety should pass, and quickly. Apart from a few mixed-to- negative reviews (”It was the best of operas, it was the worst of operas,” equivocated the New York Times, while the Wall Street Journal called it ”something of a mess”), ”The Ghosts of Versailles,” to a libretto by the composer`s longtime friend, playwright William M. Hoffman, has been garnering the kind of enthusiastic press modern opera composers usually draw only in their wildest fantasies.
And music professionals have been no less upbeat. The Lyric Opera`s Ardis Krainik liked the opera so much that well before the world premiere last Dec. 19 she agreed to assume an unspecified share of the production costs and to present it as part of her company`s 1995-96 season here.
”Sure, I`m pleased, even overwhelmed,” says Corigliano, former composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony whose widely acclaimed Symphony No. 1 had its first performances by the CSO in 1990. ”Bill and I thought we would have our heads handed to us.
”Before the event, I had regarded the ($150,000) commission as if it were the Hope Diamond, complete with curse. I (predicted) we probably wouldn`t win with the press, especially in New York. Coming in at the very top, we thought the judgment was going to be very harsh.
”I never even wanted to write an opera. But the Met persisted and I just couldn`t turn their offer down. I knew I would never have another chance like this in my life.”
From 1979, when Levine, then the Met`s music director (he now holds the title of artistic director), first approached Corigliano about writing an opera for the Met`s 1983 centennial, until 1987, when the opera was finished, was a long haul, full of frustrations for the composer and librettist.
But Corigliano, a notoriously slow composer who had never written an opera before, says the results more than justified the effortful journey from studio to stage.
”Jimmy (Levine) told me right at the beginning that one of the reasons he hired me is because I wasn`t an opera composer. He wanted me to come up with (new) solutions. And I did. As he keeps telling me, I gave him the opera he wanted.”
For the Met administration to have selected ”Ghosts” as its first commissioned opera in nearly 25 years (the last such work to have its premiere at the Met was Marvin David Levy`s ”Mourning Becomes Electra” in 1967)
represented less an act of artistic daring than a calculated hunch as to how much ”modernism” conservative Met audiences might tolerate-provided it is packaged as a big, slick, Broadway-style entertainment.
To hedge its bets further, the Met treated Corigliano and Hoffman`s opera to an unprecedented eight weeks of rehearsal time, casting it with a budget-busting lavishness seldom witnessed there, even in new productions of warhorse repertory. The huge performing apparatus includes some 40 singers, full orchestra, a smaller onstage Classical ensemble, a chorus of ghosts, and, for one scene, 40 kazoo players disguised as a Turkish marching band.
The central conceit of the so-called ”grand opera buffa” is that the aristocrats who went to the guillotine in the French Revolution haunt present- day Versailles. Among the ghostly crew is Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (Hakan Hagegard), the playwright of the Figaro plays upon which the Mozart and Rossini operas are based. Beaumarchais is deeply in love with Marie Antoinette (Teresa Stratas), the feckless queen whose head he hopes to save by changing history.
The entertainment he has devised to entertain these bored, sleepy ghosts- who bear a deliberate resemblance to the bored, sleepy subscribers of the Met-is a combination of melodrama and burlesque starring our old friends Figaro (Gino Quilico) and the Almavivas (Peter Kazaras and Renee Fleming). Along for the ride are some new characters-the count and countess`
illegitimate children Florestine and Leon (Tracy Dahl and Neil Rosenshein) and the slimy villain Begearss (Graham Clark), who hopes to marry Almaviva`s daughter and turn the Almavivas over to the rabble.
Time and place become increasingly skewed. When Figaro acts contrary to his creator`s wishes, Beaumarchais must enter his own play to set matters right. At the end of their opera, Corigliano and Hoffman suggest that, if we can`t change history, let us at least enjoy the escape into the healing realm of art that the theater (a world of fantasy, after all) provides us. That may be too simplistic and intellectually suspect a conclusion for some listeners to embrace, but, by their prolonged ovation, it is clear the Met audience finds the fantastical pleasures of ”Ghosts” acceptable enough.
As staged by Colin Graham and designed by John Conklin, ”Ghosts” is a surrealist phantasmagoria; like Corigliano`s score, it plays sly tricks with operatic convention and normal perceptions of time and space. People and pieces of scenery tilt and fly through the air. A giant, animated dummy-pasha spouts fireworks. Giant masks and choreographed mob scenes evoke the Broadway glitz of ”Phantom of the Opera” and ”Les Miserables.”
Convoluted and overstuffed though the opera may be, Hoffman`s text boasts genuinely witty pages and never confounds audience comprehension.
(Supertitles, whose use continues to be strictly forbidden at the Met, will be a welcome addition, however, once ”Ghosts” comes to Chicago.) The libretto, moreover, even allows the Met subscribers to laugh at themselves with such zingers as ”They say New York is a lively town” and ”This is not opera! Wagner is opera.”
If most of the leading characters of ”Ghosts” long for love or lost youth, the opera itself yearns for the old, pre-revolutionary world of beauty, order and reason.
”There`s a serious overview of revolution and the price of revolution,” explains Corigliano. ”Bill and I have always felt that the French Revolution has been sanitized, because the victors always rewrite history. We are not antirevolutionary; we do not preach. We just want to ask if it is possible to reconcile the advancement that revolution implies with the beauties of the past. Or, to put it another way: Can you use the past to build a future?”
That query, answered in the affirmative, might be taken as a basic tenet of Corigliano`s music. His typically eclectic score flirts with spooky serialism, dabbles in passing quotations from Mozart and Rossini, embraces old-fashioned operatic romance and exudes drippy sentimentality. (Let them eat marzipan?)
It is, without a doubt, clever, eminently singable, cannily orchestrated, at times brilliant. Like the production that surrounds it, it tries very hard- sometimes too hard-to please. One also has to wonder how effective it all might be if divorced from its intricate stage trappings.
The vocal writing is perhaps weakest in the nostalgia-driven second act, where the ghosts and buffa characters step out of the Trianon theater and become real people in revolutionary Paris. Here Corigliano`s expansive arias and ensembles would profit from judicious trimming, at least before ”Ghosts” rises again at the Lyric four seasons hence. The opera is cast in two long acts lasting nearly four hours, which is surely too long for any comic opera since ”Die Meistersinger.”
To cite just one example, the finale of Act I, a Marx Brothers romp in a Turkish embassy, comes out of nowhere (Corigliano says he included it as his homage to the 18th Century`s fondness for things Turkish) and serves only to give Marilyn Horne a campy hootchy-kootch number as a Turkish singer. Horne is a hoot, but the scene plays with the frantic abandon of pranksters who don`t know when to quit.
Corigliano himself cast several of the leading roles, and there really is not a weak link in the vocal chain.
Although Stratas` diction proves problematic, she sings intensely, making every dramatic gesture, every note of music speak to the queen`s anguish, pity and ultimate acceptance of love and destiny. Marie Antoinette`s transcendent final aria, in which she joins her lover Beaumarchais (warmly sung and elegantly played by Hagegard) in eternity, could hardly be more poignant in effect.
”The Ghosts of Versailles” received a nationwide radio broadcast on Jan. 4 and PBS has taped the opera for telecast next season. The work no doubt will undergo various tucks, trims and other modifications before the planned Lyric revival; other theaters will wish to take it up thereafter.
