What a pleasure it was to be able once again to hear, in live performance, openly gay composer John Corigliano and librettist and playwright William M. Hoffman’s “The Ghosts of Versailles,” thanks to Manhattan School of Music (MSM) Opera Theater, which presented the first of its three hearings on April 25! Inspired by Gioachino Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia;” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro;” “La Mère Coupable,” the third of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ Figaro plays; and the Terror, which followed the French Revolution, the opera was given its world premiere by the Metropolitan Opera on December 19, 1991, but hasn’t been heard there since spring 1995.
MSM gave us a welcome “I laughed, I cried, I qvelled” experience with its “Ghosts,” conducted by Steven Osgood, directed by Jay Lesenger, designed by Steven Capone (sets), Daniel James Cole (costumes), and Lee Fiskness (lighting), and choreographed by Francis Patrelle. Perhaps it took a somewhat pared-down production, shorn of the superstar power of the premiere cast and over-the-top grand opera trappings that the Met lavished on it, and which may well have distracted from the opera’s inventiveness, wit, and pathos, to show how ingenious a creation “Ghosts” really is.
When the opera begins, Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, and their peers have been dead for 200 years. To entertain their ghosts, but mostly to try to cheer ‘Antonia,’ the Queen, who still broods about her fate and the horrifying circumstances of her trial and death, Beaumarchais has written a new opera, “A Figaro for Antonia,” bringing back beloved characters Figaro, Susanna, Cherubino, and the Count and Countess Almaviva, and introducing the children the latter have had with other partners—Florestine, the Count’s daughter with an unnamed women, and Léon, the Countess and Cherubino’s son—as well as an odious, Iago-style villain, Patrick Honoré Bégearss, whose role models are the worms and rats. Beaumarchais, the Count and, ultimately, Figaro, who takes a bit of convincing, plot to rescue Marie Antoinette, but the course of history cannot be changed, the Queen comes to terms with her destiny at last, and she and Beaumarchais goes off to spend eternity together.
The striking set pieces, now sung by MSM’s young singers, happily still worked well, even without the stars who first sang them. Written for Teresa Stratas, Marie Antoinette’s aria, “They are always with me,” reliving her sentence and the taunting of the crowd, relieved only by a refrain of “Once there was a golden bird,” a reminder of her palmier days, was haunting anew, thanks to high lyric soprano Cree Carico. Originally sung by Gino Quilico, the now-middle-aged Figaro’s “Largo al factotum”-style pattering entrance aria, “They wish they could kill me,” one of several scenes in which he’s chased by lovers, creditors, and all who want a piece of him, remained a tour-de-force, as sung by lyric baritone Nickoli Strommer, who made the most of its varied list of occupations and identities that Figaro has taken on. Tenor Aaron Short, as Bégearrs, was as much the villain you wanted to hiss as Graham Clark was, and relished his Aria of the Worm, after Arrigo Boito, and “Women of Paris! Listen! Hear! Listen to their little feet!,” the rat aria. The Egyptian entertainer Samira’s comic aria, “I am in a valley and you are in a valley,” with cabaletta in Arabic, once the province of Marilyn Horne, found another coloratura mezzo-soprano, Rachelle Pike, making a meal of it now. With Strommer’s Figaro disguised as one of Samira’s dancing girls, singing in falsetto and making lewd passes at any of the men who might have Antonia’s necklace, which could help buy her freedom, the first act ended with another merry romp. Beaumarchais’ defense, when Figaro departs from the script and denounces the Queen, “Figaro was supposed to return the necklace,” with its floated refrain of “I risk my soul for you, Antonia,” once sung by Håkan Hagegård, was sensitively sculpted here by baritone Gideon Dabi.
The lovely Mozartian love duet for Countess Rosina, formerly sung by the young Renée Fleming, and Cherubino, “Come now, my darling, come with me,” which became a quartet when Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette echoed it; sad and gentle “As summer brings a wistful breeze,” for Rosina and Susanna; quartet “Remember the chestnut trees/In the gardens of the Tuileries,” for Léon, Florestine, and their parents; and moving simultaneous prayers, “O God of love,” for the Almavivas and Susanna, and the “Miserere,” for Marie Antoinette, with hints of “And I have found Demetrius, like a jewel!,” Benjamin Britten’s quartet for the four “Midsummer Night’s Dream” Athenians, after their release from all spells, made their mark once more, as sung now by sopranos Rebecca Krynski (Rosina) and Nicole Haslett (Florestine); Anthony Bucci, the newly countertenor Cherubino; mezzo-soprano Kaitlyn Costello-Fain (Susanna); and tenors Brett Sprague (Count) and Mingjie Lei (Léon).
The scene in which Louis XVI (bass-baritone James Ioelu) dueled with Beaumarchais, over Marie Antoinette, and ‘kills’ him, only to have Beaumarchais pull the sword out and return it to the King, for, as the Queen realizes, “We’re dead!,” prompting much mock stabbing, remained riotous. The graphic trial of Marie Antoinette, with Beaumarchais assuming the role of the Public Prosecutor, reenacted to convince Figaro that the Queen was treated unjustly and deserves to be saved, was moving enough to prompt Royalist sympathies.
The diverse role of ‘The Woman with a Hat,’ first played by Jane Shaulis, and encompassing an eerily slowed-down, French-language version of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” to kick off the work; an appearance in Valkyrie horns to add the line, “This is not opera! Wagner is opera,” to the first act finale’s mêlée; and a gentle mad scene in the Conciergerie prison, emerged as more prominent here, as sung by soprano Jasmine Muhammad, than it did in the fussier original.
Gone was the exploding puppet Pasha of the Met production—bass Brett Vogel made a whirling dervish entrance and greeted his guests with an orotund “Selamünaleyküm,” and like changing Cherubino from a female mezzo to a male countertenor, this was all for the good. To expand the performing space, Lesenger sensibly used the aisles for entrances, exits, chases, and escapes.
At the end of the evening, representatives from the Cincinnati-based American Classical Music Hall of Fame made a presentation to Corigliano, inducting him into the Hall.
A Met revival of “Ghosts of Versailles,” planned for the 2009-2010 season and intended to feature Angela Gheorghiu, Thomas Hampson, and Kristin Chenoweth, was deemed beyond the company’s budget and was cancelled. Hopefully another 17 years won’t have to pass before the opera takes the New York stage