But what an opera. Composer John Corigliano and librettist William M. Hoffman (who consider themselves equal partners) call it “grand opera buffa,” which doesn’t begin to convey its musical and dramatic scope. The phantasmagoric “Ghosts” is about love, loyalty, politics and, most compelling, the power of art. In a time warp of shifting realities and possibilities, it’s consumed with death, yet electric with life. Contemporary opera doesn’t have a good track record, and at the Met it hardly has one at all. “Ghosts,” Corigliano’s first opera and the Met’s first commission since 1967, beats the odds. With two orchestras (a chamber ensemble plays onstage), a byzantine plot and a lavish production that includes a mechanical pasha the size of an Aegean island, Corigliano, Hoffman and director Colin Graham continually set themselves up for a fall (even a pratfall). They never stumble.
In the prologue, set in the present, ghosts of 18th-century French aristocrats drift (some high above the stage) into Versailles. They have come for a new opera which the playwright Beaumarchais has written to entertain Marie Antoinette, who is still mourning her beheading. Beaumarchais’s characters–Susanna, Figaro, Almaviva, Rosina–are familiar not only to the wraiths but to the corporeal audience. (Beaumarchais wrote three “Figaro” plays: two were the basis for Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” and Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” the third is the jumping-off place for “Ghosts.”) But Hoffman’s Beaumarchais does not intend merely to amuse. He wants to alter history by having his characters smuggle the doomed queen (whom he has loved for 200 years) out of revolutionary France to America.
The first act glitters with perfectly calibrated hysteria: a patter song Gilbert and Sullivan would have envied, frantic chases, double-dealings and a kazoo-playing band. But restrained madness goes out of control in Act II, when Figaro rebels against the plot and refuses to help Marie Antoinette. Tragedy displaces comedy as Beaumarchais, desperate to restore order, enters his own opera. (To convince Figaro that the queen has been unjustly condemned, he even re-creates her terrible trial.) Though he fails to rewrite the past, “Ghosts” ends happily: the Almaviva clan escapes by balloon to America and Marie Antoinette is finally at peace with her destiny.
“Ghosts” is an insider’s opera. There are musical quotations (Mozartean and otherwise), both expected and sly, and referential plot devices. Opera novices won’t be lost–they will respond viscerally. Hoffman’s virtuosic libretto gives free rein to Corigliano, whose score is an atmospheric mix of serialism, romanticism, neoclassicism, Turkish pastiche and electronics. His keen theatrical sense and gift for orchestration are evident everywhere. (He isolates woodwinds, for which he has always had a special affinity, with particular effectiveness.) The prologue, with its eerie, evocative tone rows, sounds like a misty November afternoon. Haunting themes weave through the score like specters.
The cast, including Hakan Hagegard as Beaumarchais, is exceptionally strong. In a cameo, Marilyn Horne stops the show with a boisterous, Arabian coloratura vaudeville. As Almaviva’s duplicitous friend Begearss, Graham Clark is an acrobatic sadist, leaping, slithering and walking on his hands. Most chilling is Teresa Stratas as Marie Antoinette. Tiny and ashen, she is almost unbearably poignant as she reconciles herself to the past.
Only complex talents could have dreamed up “Ghosts.” Hoffman, 52, best known for “As Is,” a prizewinning 1985 play about AIDS, also writes for the soap opera “One Life to Live.” Corigliano, 53, has never allied himself with any compositional camp (“I don’t like pieces that resemble each other that much”). “Ghosts” has both the sheer fun of his flute concerto, “Pied Piper Fantasy,” and the profundity of his award-winning First Symphony, written in response to the AIDS crisis. “Music is very often a foreign language, even to music lovers,” Corigliano says. “That’s one reason I vote for clarity at all times.” He “builds” a piece before he composes. For the eerie prologue, for instance, he took a long stretch of paper and drew a “timbre fugue” with colored pencils. “I wanted to see if I could take a line of music, like smoke, and change its color as it moved,” he says. The colors came together in clusters: “When the clusters of sound got thick enough, they dropped out. Three notes were left and they became a chord.”
Unlike many contemporary works, “The Ghosts of Versailles” is already assured of an afterlife. PBS will telecast the Met production next season, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago will stage it in 1995-96. Other companies are sure to follow. “Ghosts” is a triumph. It echoes in the mind and settles in the heart.
