Before audience members took their seats for the sold-out performances of “The Ghosts of Versailles” at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, they were treated to rare, behind-the-scenes insight from John Corigliano, one of the most celebrated living composers of our time, during a pair of preshow chats April 11 and 13 which were in the form of a Q&A led by Corigliano’s husband Mark Adamo, also a famed composer.
Directed by Grammy-winning opera star Patricia Racette, the Shepherd School’s production brought Corigliano’s ghostly, genre-bending opera to dazzling life. Every voice student in the Shepherd School had a named role, filling the stage with richly layered characters from Beaumarchais’ comedies and the haunting court of Louis XVI. Backed by the Shepherd School Chamber Orchestra conducted by Rice alumnus Benjamin Manis, the cast navigated time travel, revolution,and romance with style and emotional depth.
In their chat, Corigliano and Adamo told the story of the opera’s creation. “Ghosts” marked the Metropolitan Opera’s first commission in three decades when it premiered in 1991, and it remains one of Corigliano’s most lauded theatrical creations. Corigliano and The Met decided to present a large scale comedy, something of a rarity in the operatic canon. But the opera didn’t begin with revolutionary ambition.
“When the opera was conceived, it was only going to be an extension of the famous Beaumarchais plays which were used for the operas ‘The Barber of Seville’ and ‘The Marriage of Figaro,’” said Joshua Winograde, the Shepherd School’s director of opera studies. “John decided to use those iconic characters — Figaro, Susanna, the Count and the Countess — and tell a new kind of story with them.”
Corigliano, though, said he wasn’t content to be bound by the artistic constraints of the 18th century characters or musical conventions.
“He asked his friend William Hoffman, whom John credits as an equal co-creator of this work, to write the libretto using some kind of dramatic device that would allow the story to exist in more than one time period, which in turn would allow John to compose music that sounded like it was coming from multiple dimensions of history,” Winograde said. “The two possibilities for this dramatic convention were that this 18th century story unfolded either in modern characters’ dreams or as witnessed by ghosts”
What emerged was a story told through the eyes of ghosts — most notably Marie Antoinette — who witness and influence the unfolding drama from the afterlife. That shift transformed the opera from a period piece into a timeless meditation on love, loss and redemption.
“Now, of course, Marie Antoinette is the lead role –- along with Beaumarchais himself, Louis XVI etc. — and it’s all about her watching and reliving her final days at the Palace of Versailles,” Winograde said. “The idea that this opera originally didn’t even include her as a character is inconceivable to us when we see the show now, which is all about her.
Learn more about the Shepherd School here.
