John Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles is a neglected masterpiece. That is not because an unwilling public has failed to embrace this fine ‘Grand opera buffa’, an operatic-amalgam in English. It is neglected because a willing public is too rarely able to see Corigliano’s full version. The Metropolitan Opera commissioned Ghosts in 1980 for the Met’s centennial year, 1983. It would be the first new American work to premier there since Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts in 1973. Corigliano and his librettist William M. Hoffman could not deliver the final product until seven years after the anticipated date for its Met debut on 19 December 1991 and seven fully sold out performances. The Met seats 3,800 plus 175 standing room places, for full capacity of 3,975. Those lucky 27,825 were alone until 14 October 1995 and eight performances at Chicago’s Lyric Opera’s 3,563 seat capacity. This production was a thirty-minute-shortened version whose super-titles the Lyric made available to Los Angeles, for a price underwritten by Dunard Fund USA. The Met had hoped to revive Ghosts in 2010, but the 2008 recession forced cancellation. The opera premiered in Europe in 1999 for the opening of the new Niedersächsische Staatsoper in Hannover, Germany. Ghosts in turn made its West Coast premiere at the Los Angeles Opera in February of 2015. That production cost at least a million dollars, generously supplied by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, the Blue Ribbon, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Corigliano knew that most houses are too small and too poorly endowed to stage his well-populated three hour and fifteen minute opera including a thirty-minute interval. Colin Graham conducted the Met version and, with Corigliano’s permission and recommendation, commissioned John David Earnest to revise Ghosts for those many smaller houses. This shorter version premiered in 2009 at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and again at the Wexford Festival Opera in Ireland. All or parts of the shorter version are now performed whenever Ghosts is brought back to life – at least until 7 February 2015 and six performances at the Los Angeles Opera under the expert, imaginative, but textually respectful direction of Darko Tresnjak. Corigliano’s Ghosts is part of the Los Angeles Opera’s ‘Figaro Unbound’ season, with Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and then Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro to follow. Ghosts would have been more historically comprehensible if it concluded rather than initiated the cycle, but the availability of singers trumps desire and chronology.

The solid Ghosts, ably conducted by James Conlon, was grand, with sixteen ‘principal’ roles, fifteen smaller and ensemble roles, a chorus, dancers, and several active crowd members to fill the deep Los Angeles stage. Nine singers were current or recent members of the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artists Program and all performed exceptionally well. The large cosmopolitan cast was drawn from fourteen American states, Canada, England, Iceland, Romania, China, and South Korea (x2), but sadly not France. Perhaps Dr. Guillotine might have been among the ghosts brought back to life and interrogated as appropriate. Tresnak has a great deal of busy traffic to direct and he and his cast did it well. The complex plot of this too-little seen opera demands synopsis.

The opera begins with the Royal Family and their associates in a comfortable and boring ghostly-world version of Versailles, where they are to hear yet another opera. Been there, done that, is the mood that soon will change. Louis XVI (Kristinn Sigmundson) and Marie Antoinette (Patricia Racette) are dressed in black, as if in mourning for themselves, their earthly life, and their nation. Most of the other members of the ghostly entourage are in white but with full black masks covering their faces, as signs of their beheading. Marie Antoinette is especially mournful and laments her death and absence from a world of light and laughter. Beaumarchais (Christopher Maltman), dressed in white and with a good head on his shoulders, has fallen in love with ‘Antonia’ whom he courts before a still indifferent Louis XVI. Beaumarchais will write A Figaro for Antonia, an opera that changes history and restores Antonia to the life she so misses. The ghostly chorus warns him: he risks losing his soul if he tries to change history, to which he responds with a version of amor vincit omnia as his opera-within-an-opera begins in the autumnal Paris of 1793.

The opera itself borrows heavily from Beaumarchais’s final play in his Figaro cycle, La Mère Coupable (The Guilty Mother), in which Léon, the Countess Almaviva’s (Guanqun Yu) adult son (Brenton Ryan) with Cherubino (Renée Rapier) and Florestine (Stacey Tappan), Count Almaviva’s illegitimate daughter, fall in love and wish to marry. Almaviva refuses permission. He is stern toward his wife but loyal to the queen. He plans to sell her diamond necklace to the English ambassador at the Turkish embassy reception and buy Antonia’s freedom. His nominal friend but real enemy and traitor the evil Bégearss (Robert Brubaker) wants to marry Florestine to insure that he will receive her inheritance, dominate her, and then betray Almaviva to the Revolution and the guillotine. Figaro (Lucas Meacham) and Susanna (Lucy Schaufer) again must be the servi ex machina to set all in order – if they can. Samira and entourage, including Figaro amusingly ‘disguised’ as a dancing girl, appear at the Turkish embassy just as Almaviva is about to present the necklace to the English ambassador. During the fuss, Figaro steals the jewels and escapes by jumping off a balcony.

Corigliano adapts a device familiar to anyone who has written a play, novel, or story: it is difficult to control a character once he knows his character. Figaro reveals his radical side: the queen is not worth saving; he will not return the necklace for her; he will save the Almavivas instead. Beaumarchais is livid. Antonia is troubled and will leave the audience. Beaumarchais risks danger, enters his own opera, and tries to force Figaro to obey the plot as written. After more toing and froing, Beaumarchais recreates the queen’s trial, convinces Figaro of its injustice, and moves his compassion. Yes, he will return the necklace.

The scene shifts to the Almavivas’ ballroom, where Léon, Florestine, and the count and countess reminisce about their love. The odious Bégearss breaks the mood as he rushes in with the revolutionary rabble behind him: the Revolution demands return of the necklace – to his hands. Beaumarchais and Figaro arrive and reluctantly give him the necklace, as Almaviva belatedly understands that Bégearrs is his enemy. He demands Florestine’s hand; the enlightened Almaviva refuses; all are arrested. Figaro, desperate, asks Beaumarchais to write Bégearss’s change of mind, but by entering the opera, Beaumarchais has become an actor and not a creator. Since others must do his manipulative work, Susanna helps him and Figaro to escape. The black-hooded ghosts in the stage audience dance an elegant ball; Antonia movingly realizes how much Beaumarchais loves her; the queen in the opera asks God to forgive her assassins; and the prisoners pray as they await death. It appears that the prayers will be answered if not by God, by Figaro and Beaumarchais, who enter disguised as executioners. Just as the women have snatched the keys to the cells from the German stage flunky Wilhelm, Bégearrs enters with soldiers, demands death for the prisoners, but is himself denounced and hauled off when Figaro shows that Bégearrs has kept the necklace for himself, not for the Revolution. Figaro saves the Almavivas of both generations. Beaumarchais is about to free Antonia when she stops him: if she lives again, she will lose Beaumarchais. Antonia as royal prisoner goes to her fate. Antonia as royal ghost loves Beaumarchais as spectral, but for her real, playwright. The final scenes have three key events: the Almavivas, Figaro, and Susanna are wafted off to the new world in a balloon, perhaps to land in a strange place called Los Angeles. Beaumarchais retains the necklace and places it around Antonia’s neck. The guillotine did its historical job and, if paradoxically, Beaumarchais did his operatic job: he has indeed changed history, but not in the way he thought, not history as real fact, but history as the love of a man for a woman, even when each is spectral. In this sense The Ghosts of Versailles is about the power of art to return the dead to life and life to the dead.

Corigliano’s introductory music, heard within the set’s handsomely elegant royal rotunda (Alexander Dodge), sets the mood well: it begins with about two minutes of high-level eerie avant-garde music of the sort familiar to lovers of horror films. We promptly know that the opera’s eighteenth century is in a timeless immaterial world. The contrast of present and past indeed permeates Ghosts. Antonia lived then but wants to live now. Beaumarchais was influential then but wants to be influential now. When the horrors of the French Revolution emerge later in the opera, the revolutionary Bégearss seeks to mask murder and betrayal beneath the propaganda of putative virtue. The librettist Hoffman has him quote from a speech by the Nazi Heinrich Himmler. The opera-within-the-opera itself at first seeks to change at least one part of the Terror – the beheading of Beaumarchais’s love Marie Antoinette. Louis XVI is irrelevant.

I have called the opera itself an amalgam. For example, the modern music soon gives way to Straussian lyric; there are other Romantic and Mozartean echoes; there is a set piece by Figaro that could have come from Gilbert and Sullivan; there is a wonderfully comic parody of an eighteenth-century love of all things Eastern. Patty Lupone, bravely crossing the Rubicon and leaving Broadway, plays the Egyptian Samira. She arrives at the Turkish embassy on an elephant, sings glorious foolishness, does the proper wiggles of the proper parts of her body, and in the amiable opera buffa tradition, makes no sense and produces great pleasure. Corigliano gives his complex serious-comic-romantic vision another operatic joke that recalls the great American baseball player and neologist extraordinaire Yogi Berra’s ‘it aint over ‘till the fat lady sings.’ At one point a horned-helmet-bearing, armor-wearing, spear-carrying warrior materializes among the French and Spanish characters: ‘This is not opera. Wagner is opera!’ she proclaims. The French rush her off the stage, presumably back to pompous Teutonic-land. After all, the term is opera buffa not helden tenor Oper. Leave the leitmotif in the Gesamtkuntswerk, per favore.

Ghosts of Versailles has another remarkably strong suit: English proves itself eminently suitable for a complex romantic opera in a Shakespearean tragi-comic plot. Purcell, Handel, and Britten are the great trinity of British opera in English, as Menotti, Glass, and Adams are the chronologically constrained American trinity. There is little doubt that Corigliano should be added to that list as, in the case of Ghosts at least, the equal of the best of Britten and a great deal more fun. The Los Angeles 2015 performance supports that point, perhaps even more than the Met’s in 1992 – which is currently the only available recording of Ghosts. The Los Angeles audio is scheduled for recording late in 2016. Assuming the same or equal cast, buy it, listen, and test my hypothesis. In the process, raise a million pounds, enlarge the Royal Opera House’s stage to accommodate heavier traffic, import Corigliano to help select the principal singers, find a conductor as precise as James Conlon, challenge David McVicar to do as good a directing job as Darko Tresnjak, invite the French, Spanish, and Austrian ambassadors, rush to get tickets, and then enjoy three earthly hours of Ghosts of Versailles during the Halloween season. All that should be easy enough.

LA Opera’s new production of The Ghosts of Versailles took place from 7th February – 1st March 2015.