Let them see 'Ghosts'

When he wrote his eerie, energetic and ironic opera ‘The Ghosts of Versailles’, American composer John Corigliano chose to write one teeming with arias, ensembles, solos and duets.

WHEN JOHN CORIGLIANO'S opera The Ghosts of Versaillespremiered at New York's Metropolitan Opera just before Christmas 1991, it was immediately hailed as one of the major musical events not only of the year but of that still-young decade. The run sold out immediately. In the courtyards and foyers of the Met, opera lovers begged for tickets. In the box office, they drew up a waiting list. Inside the house from the first night on, reported the New York Times, "there was the kind of excitement rare at opera premieres.

Listeners walked up the aisles at the intermission discussing their favourite arias and ensembles”. It had arrived, said the critics; the great new American opera they had been waiting for, and it had come courtesy of a New Yorker, a Brooklynite, who had never written an opera before.

Nor has he written one since. There have been more than 100 scores – symphonies, concerti, film scores, works for voice, orchestra and electronics – and there has been huge acclaim; as the awards lined up on the mantel of his Manhattan studio testify, Corigliano is, at 71, one of the most significant composers working in the US today. There's an Oscar there, for the score to Francois Girard's The Red Violin(1997). There's a Bafta for the score to an earlier film, Revolution,in 1986. There's the Grawemeyer Award for his Symphony No 1(1991), a powerful elegy for friends lost to Aids, and there's the Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No 2(2001). And there are three Grammy Awards, among them the gong Corigliano won in 1999 for the recording of Mr Tambourine Man, his vocal work based on the lyrics of Bob Dylan.

Looming over them all is a framed poster from that 1991 premiere of The Ghosts of Versailles, an image that weaves together the strands of eeriness, enchantment and lunatic energy that make the opera such a rarity – and such a rich riot. Audiences at the Wexford Festival Opera will see this tapestry for themselves when a new performing version of Ghosts (a co-production with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis which premiered in June at the Opera Theatre of St Louis, Missouri) opens the 58th festival tomorrow night.

Ghosts is set between worlds supernatural, theatrical and historical which intermingle – and, crucially, interfere – with each other in the setting of Marie Antoinette’s private theatre in the palace of Versailles. Historical time scarcely ever comes to bear on the opera, only enough to give us the sense that these ghosts have been ghosts for the 200 years since their deaths during the French Revolution.

Among the ghosts are Marie Antoinette and her husband Louis XVI, as well as the playwright Beaumarchais, author of The Barber of Sevilleand The Marriage of Figaro, and also of a later play, The Guilty Mother, on which Corigliano's librettist, William M Hoffman, based Ghosts: another mingling or muddling of reality and imagination. The character of Beaumarchais has fallen madly in love with the ghost of the executed queen, and for her he creates and stages a new opera, featuring the familiar characters of Figaro and the Almaviva family, who attempt to change the course of history and save the queen from her fate.

But “history as it should have been” is no less straightforward than history as it truly was, as Beaumarchais discovers when his creations begin to depart from his careful script.

That Corigliano is still intensely involved with the opera, 18 years later, that he is still proud of it, that he is still convinced of the rightness of its meditations on change and power and responsibility; all this is obvious from the fluency and frankness with which he talks about it, and about the process of first bringing it into being with Hoffman, at the suggestion of the conductor James Levine. But it will remain his only opera, Corigliano says. And in a way, it’s a wonder that a Corigliano opera came about at all.

“It’s a funny situation,” Corigliano says. “The genesis of this was so strange. I met James Levine about a project for voice and orchestra that had nothing to do with opera, because I didn’t want to write an opera. Because I knew how long it took, and I knew that if it wasn’t an absolute hit, it wouldn’t get done again, because of the economics of it being a whole evening and so expensive.”

But Levine, hearing these reservations, was not to be swayed; even in 1979 when they first had that conversation, Levine knew that something spectacular would be needed to mark the Met’s centenary in 1991. And he knew that he wanted that something spectacular to be a new opera, given that the Met had not commissioned one in decades. “So, he said to me, well, what would you do if you did an opera, and I said I would do a buffa. And that’s when he got really surprised, because in this day and age, people don’t think of that as a valid way of expressing things. Since the German Romantic period, music is deadly serious, and it’s full of angst and sorrow. And God knows I’ve written pieces like that, like my first symphony.

“But I said, no, I want joy in the opera house. I think that, physically, a buffa can affect you in a wonderful way and I wanted to do that.” Also, he knew, the buffa convention would corner him into writing the kind of opera he wanted to write – one teeming over with arias, ensembles, solo pieces, duets, rather than what Corigliano describes as the “wash of line”, the pure flow, that constitutes some modern opera, out of which the audience can fix upon nothing, say, to hum to themselves as they walk the aisles of the Met or the Wexford Opera House during intermission.

“You know, inflected words that never become arias, never become melodies, never become pieces,” he says. “I think that, especially in a form that’s as large as opera, [with] things that last two and a half hours, it’s more important than any place else to actually compartmentalise, and write things that have beginnings, middles and ends. Because otherwise, the flow is wonderful, but you don’t remember anything.”

Corigliano’s stance seems strikingly old-fashioned, even populist; later, talking about the impact that 20th century composition made upon what is generically called “classical” music, he is equally forthright about the dangers of what he describes as “writing in a certain way, writing in a very highly intellectual process that was incomprehensible”. Incomprehensible, that is, to the audience.

"If you're just going to sit and watch the back of somebody waving his hands, and a bunch of people in black suits playing, that's not really enough," says Corigliano. "If nobody can hear the music unless they know the rules, you cut the audience out of the process." Yet Ghostsis hardly buffa-by-numbers, hardly a gentle carousel of one hummable aria after another. It opens with a nerve-jangling, jumpy evocation of an unhappy afterlife, then moves into sharply ironic borrowings from Mozart and Rossini, throwing in a high-camp take-off of Turkish wind music, some utterly haunting arias and ensembles (you will hear Once There Was a Golden Birdand O God of Lovein your head for days afterwards), some 50 kazoos and perhaps the heaviest leaning on an electronic synthesizer ever witnessed in a production originally commissioned by the Met.

With characters who watch an opera even as they are part of one, who construct fictions of the past even as they themselves represent – and parody – such fictions, Ghostsis an opera as much about opera, and about perceptions of what opera should and should not be, as it is about its ostensible subjects, the frazzled phantoms and fragments of a violent revolution. Corigliano himself has described Ghostsas standing for "an anti-modernist view", as confronting modernism in every sense – musical as well as historical – and finding it wanting. "It's an opera about different kinds of change," he says. "And the change of the French Revolution, that violent change where you just create rubble and build something new by ignoring the past, is different to the kind of change that uses the past, remembers it, and then blends it with the present and the future as it goes forward."

Yet there is also a strong warning within Ghosts, against the path of resisting change, resisting the modern. In the liberties it takes, and the parodies it makes, when it comes to beloved operatic characters – Figaro, Susanna, the Count and Countess and Cherubino – Ghostswarns against the imprisonment of opera, and classical music, in an airless garden of the past.

“It’s funny, because of the subject, but I think it’s a very American piece, in that way,” says Corigliano. “We’re standing back, in a way that perhaps European artists would not, from that tradition. We love it, but at the same time, we also think some of it is a little ridiculous, and, you know, it’s that combination, and I think that’s probably partly from being an American, and out of the culture, and growing up that way.” When the opera premiered, successful as it was, Corigliano encountered what he saw as some resistance to its anti-modernist stance, some disapproval, from European companies who did not travel to see it, even when it was produced in Hannover. But that has changed now. And, in the 18 years since the ghosts first walked the stage of the Met, the realities of change and responsibility have shifted, become more troubled, too.

" Ghoststalks about what happens if you change things in a fundamentalist manner, in a dogmatic way, and how destructive that is, and that there are other ways to do it," says Corigliano. "More than ever, we are seeing a world that is changing rapidly. You know, right now, across town, Obama is sitting down to talk to the UN about nuclear disarmament, to change things that way, rather than to change things the other way. So we are talking about two different kinds of change. And more and more we're seeing around the world that French Revolution version of change, where if you're not with us, you die. But the minute you have an idea that there's only one way for anything, whether it's musical or political, you end up in a very bad situation. You end up with intolerance. And then, only bad things can happen."

The Ghosts of Versaillesis on Oct 21, 24, 27 and 30 as part of Wexford Festival Opera, in repertory with Maria Padilla and a double bill, Une éducation manquée and La cambiale di matrimonio. wexfordopera.com