When was the last time you heard the words “contemporary opera” and “crowd-pleaser” uttered in the same breath?
Yet that was precisely the surprise John Corigliano and William M. Hoffman pulled on a sold-out Metropolitan Opera audience in December 1991 when their opera “The Ghosts of Versailles” had its world premiere in that august theater.
Not only did the audience cheer the singers, but they also gave the composer and librettist a roaring ovation. They loved the singable melodies Corigliano had poured into his eclectic, postmodern score. They adored the broad comedy mixed with romantic pathos of Hoffman’s libretto.
And they ate up John Conklin’s lavish, surrealistic set pieces–especially the zany, Turkish-style showstopper featuring a 30-foot-tall turbaned pasha with rolling eyes and wiggling feet, a dancing girl who’s really a guy and a sultry veiled Egyptian diva accompanied by 40 kazoos. Coming from so notoriously conservative a public, the reaction was almost as noteworthy as the opera itself.
Commissioned to celebrate the Met’s centenary, “Ghosts” turned out to be the most successful American opera of the last 25 years. More than 100 reviews appeared in the world press, followed by national radio and TV broadcasts and a commercial video release. Last season the Met brought back the Corigliano-Hoffman opus, again successfully.
Although a few New York critics dismissed the effort as a thin and superficial pastiche, Corigliano and Hoffman were too busy laughing all the way to the bank to much notice, or care.
On so unprecedented a wave of popular acclaim, their so-called “grand opera buffa,” “The Ghosts of Versailles,” arrives at the Civic Opera House Saturday for its local premiere, courtesy of Lyric Opera of Chicago.
The Lyric revival (this season’s American contribution to Lyric’s “Toward the 21st Century” program) will feature two of the original principals, baritone Hakan Hagegard as the playwright Beaumarchais and tenor Graham Clark as the villain Begearss. Director Colin Graham and designer Conklin will re-create their production, which is co-owned by the Lyric. (Conklin also is designing the Lyric’s new Wagner “Ring” cycle.)
Other singers taking major roles include soprano Sheri Greenawald as Marie Antoinette, soprano Sylvia McNair as Rosina, baritone Dwayne Croft as Figaro, tenor Richard Drews as Count Almaviva, mezzo-soprano Wendy White as Susanna, and mezzo Della Jones in the Marilyn-Horne-created role of the vampy Egyptian singer, Samira. Leonard Slatkin will share podium duties with Arthur Fagen.
Chicagoans know the 57-year-old Corigliano chiefly for his tenure as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s composer-in-residence during the 1980s. That tenure culminated in the 1990 premiere of Symphony No. 1, his response to the AIDS epidemic. Hoffman, one of the country’s most accomplished playwrights, is perhaps best known for his pioneering AIDS drama, “As Is,” produced on Broadway in 1985.
A story of love
With “The Ghosts of Versailles,” Corigliano and Hoffman, 56, have taken on a less topical but more universal subject: the French Revolution as a metaphor for mankind’s need to reconcile the beauties of the past with the revolutionary spirit of the new–and the steep human price that any revolution exacts.
Enter the opera’s primary ghosts, Marie Antoinette and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, real-life playwright of “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro,” whose liberal politics helped speed the French queen to the guillotine. The work is set in a present-day Versailles haunted by the specters of Louis XVI and his court. For 200 years Marie has mourned her untimely demise; during that time Beaumarchais has patiently nursed his love for the murdered queen.
To shake her from her melancholy and win her affection, Beaumarchais resolves to change the course of history so that the queen may live to escape with him to the New World, where they can die happily ever after. He stages a play involving Marie and the characters from his Figaro plays, including the Count and Countess Almaviva, the page Cherubino and Figaro, still a master at saving the necks of aristocrats. As is typical of any decent opera buffa, misadventures ensue.
With Act 2, the opera’s tone turns more serious as Beaumarchais enters the world of his characters and re-creates Marie Antoinette’s fateful trial in a last-ditch attempt to save his lover from the guillotine.
Corigliano and Hoffman borrow some of their plot elements from the little-known third play of Beaumarchais’ Figaro trilogy, “La Mere Coupable” (The Guilty Mother), which follows the fortunes of the Almavivas after they move from Seville to France during the time of the revolution.
Corigliano’s unabashedly eclectic score shifts at warp speed from one type of music to the next, from real and faux Mozart to post-serial and electronic, all of it filtered through his musical personality. It is the score of a very theatrical composer who is eager to please, but, more, eager to communicate with his audience.
The time-tripping notion also appealed to Hoffman’s sense of fantasy, the librettist admits. “I wanted to have the freedom to rampage through history, past and present, as I wished,” he recalls. “What interests me in art is not divorcing ourselves from the past, but using the past to create something valid and beautiful in the present.”
Many would say the creative team has achieved that. Rather than sounding arbitrary, Corigliano’s styles (he prefers to call them “techniques”) clearly define each of the opera’s worlds and allow them to intersect in dramatically meaningful ways.
A trimmed-down version
From 1979, when Met artistic director James Levine first proposed Corigliano create a new work for the Met centenary, “Ghosts” took more than a decade to complete. Corigliano and Hoffman divided a stipend of $150,000 but because that was hardly enough to support either of them they had to interrupt work on the opera to realize other projects.
The Lyric edition of “Ghosts” will be a trimmer, sleeker model than what Met audiences saw and heard. Both composer and librettist took pruning shears to the score, trimming music from both acts. Certain set pieces, such as Marie Antoinette’s poignant closing aria, were completely rewritten.
By the same token, Graham has scaled down his designs for the Lyric stage, which is both shallower and narrower than the Met’s. The director says he welcomes the relative intimacy of Lyric’s theater. A further aid to audience involvement will be projected English captions, which were not used with the Met production.
Gone, too, will be the chamber orchestra that had accompanied the play-within-a-play at the Met. At the Lyric, its function will be taken by an enlarged orchestra in the pit. This means that one conductor now must sort out layers of sound that originally were assigned to two. All of which makes Slatkin’s job that much tougher. Says the conductor: “Yesterday at an orchestra rehearsal I got to the point where I took the score, turned around and said to an assistant, `Here, give this to Pierre Boulez–let him figure it out.’ “
Corigliano’s score is so well crafted for the stage, so gratifying to perform and to listen to, that one is astounded to learn “Ghosts” is the composer’s first opera. “John writes superbly well for the voice,” says director Graham. “I would compare him to Benjamin Britten in that he understands what the voice should do and what it shouldn’t.”
`We’re not respectably dead!’
If the opera has been criticized for one thing, it is that Corigliano and Hoffman are pasticheurs, pandering to the Met audience while trashing operatic tradition. Both men understandably bristle at the charge.
“I don’t see these critics accusing Beethoven, Mozart and Rossini of using pastiche or pandering; they, too, were building on the past,” Hoffman argues. “So why is the term `pandering’ used to describe what once was the normal process of writing an opera that was going to please people? The trouble with John and me is, we are alive. That’s what I think the critics have against us–we’re not respectably dead!”
Corigliano insists that all the music in “Ghosts,” no matter how disparate in style, is interrelated and flows out of the complex structure of the opera: “What I do is take worlds of music that collide and provide them with a situation in which they can coexist. The musics may be very simple but their coexistence is very complex.”
Rather than mocking the Met and the Lyric, or their audiences, as a New York Times critic charged, “we really were mocking ourselves,” the composer says. “We are saying the artifice is something we love but can also laugh at. We have written arias and ensembles we think are truly beautiful; if this piece were entirely sarcasm, you wouldn’t have that.”
Corigliano says he isn’t interested in writing another big opera, having sweated so many years over the last one. In fact, currently he’s readying a string quartet for the farewell tour of the Cleveland Quartet, to be premiered Oct. 26 in Toronto. For their next collaboration, he and Hoffman are planning a musical adaptation of the latter’s comedy, “Cornbury.” And Hoffman’s magnum opus, a 10-character play called “Riga,” is set to open off-Broadway in April, with Marshall Mason (“As Is”) directing.
“The message of this opera,” concludes Hoffman, “is that you can live forever in the spirit. What wins in the end is Beaumarchais’ love for Marie Antoinette. Her depression lifts because of his willingness to sacrifice his eternal soul for her. You might say that’s not realistic. But I wanted to portray this eternal gift that he could give her. And I would like my art to be able to do that, to show that life and love are worthwhile.”
