TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/123091/1230440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.5 KB | 114 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 82

Something New For the Met


The Ghosts of Versailles, a world premiere, makes for a lively
show

By MARTHA DUFFY -- With reporting by Nancy Newman/New York


    The Metropolitan Opera, goes the old line, is New York
City's second Met museum. It's an acrid joke, deriding the opera
house's conservative repertory, its emphasis on Verdi, Puccini
and Wagner standards. Where, the critics ask, is innovation?
What about experiment? But the hard truth is that new works
don't sell, and the Met, with one of the most ambitious
schedules in the world, must try to fill 4,000 seats at 210
performances a season. And for the most part, its forays into
premieres have been failures. Met veterans still wince at the
memory of the disastrous premiere of Samuel Barber's Antony and
Cleopatra, written to inaugurate the company's new quarters at
Lincoln Center in 1966.

    Last week the company offered its first world premiere
since that ill-fated season, and for a change it looks as if the
Met has a hit. The work is The Ghosts of Versailles, by New
York City-born John Corigliano, 53. The Met's artistic
director, James Levine, picked Corigliano with both genuine
admiration and a steady eye on the box office. Corigliano's
theatrical, highly finished orchestral works, including clarinet
and flute concertos and a symphony, are being played with
increasing frequency around the country and are popular with
audiences. His score for Ghosts may not be trailblazing music,
but it is effective and, above all, singable. There are melodic
arias and ensembles, some clever, pleasing Mozart pastiches, and
climaxes tumultuous enough to rival Les Miserables.

    If the audience at Ghosts, which is being performed during
the next three weeks, wearies of the attenuated, ectoplasmic
string sounds that emanate rather too frequently from the pit,
there is always some action to watch onstage. This show never
quits. The marvel is that it has been fashioned out of what
would seem to be very awkward, complex material. Corigliano was
interested in a story that would include the characters from The
Marriage of Figaro as they appear 20 years later in
Beaumarchais's play La Mere Coupable. He asked his librettist,
William Hoffman, "to create a libretto that did not set me in
1792 but set me in a world of smoke and haze from which I could
look into the past, leap into or out of the past."

    The eponymous ghosts are French aristocrats, including
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who were guillotined during the
Revolution. Another ghost is Beaumarchais himself, who has been
in love with the queen for 200 spectral years. But she yearns
only to live again. To amuse the ghosts and court the queen,
Beaumarchais stages a Figaro opera-within-the-opera. The
intrigues of the Almaviva household have changed little since
Mozart's time. Both the count and countess have illegitimate
children. Figaro is still the wily meddler, but his affection
for practical Susanna remains firm.

    In the course of his drama, Beaumarchais (well sung by
baritone Hakan Hagegard) decides to enter the action -- don't
ask how -- to enable his beloved to escape prison and flee to
Philadelphia. The scheme depends on selling her diamond
necklace, which changes hands roughly as often as the Rhine
gold. In the end Marie decides to accept her grisly historical
fate, though she does confess that she has fallen in love with
Beaumarchais.

    The trouble with the queen's change of heart is that it is
never made convincing dramatically. That leaves soprano Teresa
Stratas, emotionally eloquent as ever and in superb voice, with
very little to do beyond expressing continual anguish. While
librettist Hoffman does well portraying the sexual jealousy of
the Almavivas and the connubial loyalty of Figaro and Susanna,
his lead couple remain elusive.

    Mercifully, Ghosts is not much about romantic drears, or
even introspection. Corigliano set out to compose an opera
buffa, an 18th century-style comic opera such as Figaro or Cosi
Fan Tutte. As realized on the stage, scene after scene has a
vivid, antic quality that somehow escapes being overly busy.
Exploiting the vastness of the Met stage, designer John Conklin
deploys props -- solid, handsome, witty -- in ever shifting
assemblages. Director Colin Graham sends ghostly ladies flying
gently through the air, each looking like a Fragonard
dreamscape. Whatever their sins against the people, these
aristocrats have found a happy repose, and the opera's creators
betray a considerable royalist bias.

    Among several lavish set pieces, the showstopper is a
Turkish scene at the end of the first act. Such exotic
interludes were a vogue in the 18th century, and Corigliano and
Hoffman mock the form with glee. The setting is an outlandish
reception at the Turkish embassy, presided over by a 12-ft. foam
pasha from whose mail-slot mouth a bass voice emerges. As the
sultry singer Samira, mezzo Marilyn Horne reclines lasciviously
on a plushy couch and tosses off a florid cavatina and cabaletta
to words from an Arabic phrase book ("I am in a valley, and you
are in a valley . . ."). It's diverting and spectacular in a
rather sweet, good-humored way. And that, despite the dark
shadow of the guillotine, is the prevailing mood of Ghosts and
the reason for its effectiveness. The final image: Marie
Antoinette and Beaumarchais strolling tranquilly together in
their Fragonard paradise.