LOS ANGELES — I once met a woman who had worked in finance during what she called the “go-go 1980s.” “Lots of zeros, lots,” she said with a smile and not a little relish, recalling the size of the salaries.
“The Ghosts of Versailles,” currently being performed at the Los Angeles Opera, may well have been the epitome of lots-of-zeros, go-go opera. An extravagantly fanciful riff on “The Guilty Mother,” the little-read final play in Beaumarchais’ 18th-century “Figaro” trilogy, it was conceived at the end of the 1970s by the composer John Corigliano and the librettist William H. Hoffman.
After gestating over the next decade, the work finally had its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera in December 1991, eight years later than originally planned. But “Ghosts” made up for lost time with sheer size: a vast chorus, a hulking set and an onstage orchestra in addition to the one in the pit.
While a pared-down arrangement has had some success in recent years, it’s no surprise that with opera’s cash-flush ’80s long over, productions of the full-scale work have been few and far between. A planned Met revival was canceled after the Great Recession began.
The Los Angeles Opera’s run of the full original version, seen on Thursday, is therefore not just a rare opportunity to take stock of an important modern score. It is also a de facto memorial to an entire operatic ethos, exemplified by the lavish productions of Franco Zeffirelli, that’s now vanished about as completely as the guillotined aristocrats who give “Ghosts” its title. Does the work, conjuring up those long-ago days, feel as if it has too many zeros for 2015?
That the answer is no is largely because of the production’s conductor, James Conlon, and its director, Darko Tresnjak, a Tony Award winner last year for “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.” While “Ghosts” is still a grandiose endeavor, Mr. Conlon and Mr. Tresnjak, an excellent cast and an inspired design team reveal a clearer, lighter, brighter work than the one seen at the Met nearly 25 years ago, at least as it was captured then on video.
Not that “Ghosts” has lost its convolutions, with worlds colliding within it, sometimes confusingly. There is the present day, in which the very deceased Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Beaumarchais and their patrician compatriots have gathered at Versailles as ghosts. Then there is the opera inside the opera, loosely based on “The Guilty Mother,” which features the characters familiar from “The Barber of Seville” and “The Marriage of Figaro,” still scheming, a couple of decades later and a good deal more bitter.
Beaumarchais has planned the show to try to spare Marie Antoinette, whom he adores, from the French Revolution’s wrath, using the power of art to change the course of history. That revolutionary history itself enters the picture as the story deepens.
Mr. Corigliano handles the complex interplay of these different levels with admirable craftsmanship. The ghosts inhabit an eerily ethereal sphere of dissonant slides and sudden brassy jags, while Beaumarchais’ production features agile pastiches of the rollicking energy and aching lyricism of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.” The Revolution is a grim, simmering sonic landscape. (This may not be the opera for you if republicanism is your thing.)
The libretto is similarly polished. The camp and winking jokes — a Wagnerian soprano interloper, in breastplate and horns, brings down the Act I curtain — are precisely balanced by moments of earnest savagery or tenderness.
It’s all well calibrated. The trouble is that there’s not much of a payoff, other than a few chuckles and admiration for the creators’ diligent, ultimately safe, conservative work. “Ghosts” is surely ambitious, but in size, not surprise.
For a piece in which emotions ostensibly run high — everyone, as usual in opera, is always in love or in hate with everyone else — the emotional power is strangely muted. Marie Antoinette, the central figure (here the sympathetic soprano Patricia Racette), never quite comes to life — or death. While her ghost bemoans, at great length, her execution and longs to be revived, it’s hard to care either way, since her character lacks texture and personality.
Her love duets with Beaumarchais (the slyly articulate, resonant baritone Christopher Maltman) drag, one extreme of the score’s tonal shifts, which can feel less like variety than whiplash. A scene of farce gets the blood flowing before the focus returns to the ghosts and the pace slows to a crawl.
The comic, quick-moving passages were the most effective in Thursday’s performance, perhaps because Mr. Tresnjak is savvy about organizing chaos. Act I closes with a long, riotous scene at the Turkish embassy that went more swiftly than it had at the Met. It didn’t hurt that the juicy cameo role of the entertainer Samira, created at the Met by the great mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, had gone to the Broadway diva Patti LuPone, who dispatched her pseudo-exotic number with daffy charm.
The baritone Lucas Meachem is a lively Figaro, and the tenor Joshua Guerrero a warm-toned Count Almaviva. Guanqun Yu’s coolly penetrating soprano emphasizes the Countess’s reserve, while Robert Brubaker glowers convincingly as the work’s villain, Bégearss. Mr. Conlon does his best to aerate and focus the score, but it still feels meandering and flat.
What poignancy the opera does have comes in large part from a specter never mentioned in its libretto: the AIDS epidemic. As they developed the piece, both creators addressed the crisis explicitly elsewhere (Mr. Corigliano in his Symphony No. 1 and Mr. Hoffman in his play “As Is”), but I don’t think they entirely ignored it in “Ghosts.” What else is the work but a melancholy longing for a time before a bloody massacre?
That the opera needs this outside assistance, as it were, to make its impact marks it as less a significant, permanent addition to the repertory than an evocation of a particular moment: the 1980s. It bears intriguing if, in the end, inert witness to both that decade’s absurd profligacy and its unimaginable losses.
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