Something New For the Met

By Martha Duffy

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.

With reporting by Nancy Newman/New York