Opera in the 20th Century

October 06, 2004

October 8: The Ghosts of Versailles

Posted by Charles T. Downey at 12:10 AM | Link to this post

John Corigliano (b. 1938)The Ghosts of Versailles was premiered in 1991 at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and revived there in 1994. It was then produced in 1995 at the Chicago Lyric Opera, with its European premiere in 1999 for the opening of the new Niedersächsische Staatsoper in Hannover, Germany. The work was never recorded for CD, and the videotape and laserdisc versions of the Met premiere are now out of print.

Music: John Corigliano (b. 1938), winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Music, for his Symphony No. 2, and an Oscar in 2000, for his score to the film The Red Violin (by the director who made the extraordinary Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould)

Libretto: William M. Hoffman, after Beaumarchais's La Mère Coupable (1792)

John Simon's article, Other People’s Music: Corigliano at the Met in The New Criterion (vol. 10, no. 6, February 1992), written a few months after the 1991 premiere gives the following perspective:
Long in gestation and long in duration, The Ghosts of Versailles has arrived at the Metropolitan Opera as one of the most sumptuous productions I have seen on any operatic stage. With music by John Corigliano and a libretto by William M. Hoffman, it is the first new opera commissioned by the Met in a quarter century, or since Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra and Marvin David Levy's much worse Mourning Becomes Electra proved failures. It was twelve years ago, in 1979, that James Levine suggested to Corigliano at a dinner party that he write an opera for the Met's centenary season, 1983–84; the three-hour work did not get written and produced till December 17, 1991, amid considerable hoopla and fanfare. (It had become, along the way, a joint commission with the Chicago Lyric Opera, where it will be seen during the 1995–96 season.) Was it worth the effort, the wait, and the reported four-million-dollar cost? [...]

Applauded, too—perhaps above all—were John Conklin's ostentatious sets and costumes. The scenery was not exactly uncluttered, but, opulent and versatile, it achieved kaleidoscopic effects. One could see where those millions of dollars went—or, rather, sashayed, capered, tripped, and thronged. Surely, what was being applauded was trappings and tumult.
According to Simon, Hoffman himself admitted the parallels of his libretto to the Strauss-Hofmannsthal Ariadne auf Naxos, in which the story also involves the staging of an opera. For Simon, the failure of the opera lies in the lack of sympathy we feel for the love between Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette:
This is the weakest aspect of a weak libretto and music: neither verbally nor musically are we made to believe in and care for this love story. But if we don't believe and care, how are we to buy what Hoffman calls the "philosophical basis of the opera," that it is "a spiritual reconciliation between the legitimate desire to improve things, which represents the revolution [i.e., is represented by the revolution], and the spirit of the ancien régime. So my marriage between the two is after death, in the afterworld, between the two leading proponents of both [i.e., the leading proponents of each]." What disingenuous nonsense! If this were "the motivation for the whole thing," as Hoffman also says, the piece would not be flagrant camp, and the two main characters would be more complex and more real.
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