“I didn’t want to write an opera,” says John Corigliano. The award-winning composer—who has taken home the Grammy, Oscar, and Pulitzer for various works—speaks plainly and bluntly about his 1980 commission from the Metropolitan Opera. In celebration of the company’s centennial, he wrote his first—and, to date, only—opera, the landmark The Ghosts of Versailles. A devotee of Samuel Barber, Corigliano witnessed firsthand the tepid reception of his mentor’s own Met commission, 1966’s Antony and Cleopatra, and was equally discouraged by the difficulties Aaron Copland had with his only full-length opera, 1954’s The Tender Land. (Copland himself dubbed opera “la forme fatale.”) Released last year on DVD as part of the Metropolitan Opera’s James Levine 40th anniversary box set and receiving revised productions by Opera Theatre of St. Louis and the Wexford Festival Opera (with a Vancouver production on the horizon), Corigliano’s work is now being rediscovered by a new generation of singers and composers.
A case study in and of itself, the juxtaposition between “Ghosts” and Little Women (the first opera of Corigliano’s partner, Mark Adamo, and a repertory staple) is striking. With both operas now on DVD (Little Women courtesy of Naxos), there exists an opportunity to study the challenges composers face with opera—and what keeps some married to the form and others almost entirely removed from it. Corigliano has since written vocal music, including the Grammy-winning Mr. Tambourine Man and One Sweet Morning, a work commemorating the 10th anniversary of September 11 that was given its world premiere in September of this year by the New York Philharmonic and mezzo Stephanie Blythe, but he has not ventured back into opera.
Twelve years in the making from the first conversation to the opera’s world premiere, “Ghosts” had a lot riding on its shoulders: over a decade of writing and preparation, the Met’s first new opera since 1967, and a cast culled from some of the opera firmament’s brightest stars (from Teresa Stratas to Marilyn Horne to a young Renée Fleming). The reluctant composer ultimately decided that if he were to write an opera, it would be steeped in the tradition of opéra bouffe. “The techniques of bouffe, the way bouffes are put together, demand that you write melodies,” Corigliano explains. “Whereas if you write a tragic opera, you can get away with kind of an arioso, endless kind of lyrical (but not melodic in the punctuation) . . . kind of writing.
“But I just fantasized,” Corigliano adds, also noting that he and librettist William M. Hoffman had looked at the third play in Beaumarchais’ Figaro trilogy, La mère coupable, as potential source material. Resurrecting the characters of Figaro, the Count Almaviva, Susanna, Cherubino, and Rosina seemed like a logical step for Corigliano’s interests.
The characters were the same, but the game was radically different in “Ghosts,” starting off with an 11 o’clock number 11 minutes into the opera. It was most likely at this point, when Marie Antoinette makes her entrance with a terrifying scena that relives her bloody execution, that audiences realized they were in for an opera unlike anything they had previously seen at the Met. And while challenging to ears and singers, Corigliano had the fortune of writing the role of Marie for Teresa Stratas.
“The way Teresa delivered it was fabulous,” the composer says. “Many [singers], when they speak, it doesn’t work very well. Number one, they don’t project the way she does and, number two, they don’t act the way she does. All of a sudden the acting goes out the window when they have to speak.” Not so for Stratas, who balanced soaring soprano passages with guttural shouts as she relived her ascent to the guillotine. By musical design, “Ghosts” was a premonition of the blend of theatricality and keen acting skills that was to soon be required for opera.
“Drama enters the aria,” Corigliano explains. “The aria isn’t a stopping point where everything stops and you sing only. It has to be part of the drama, whether funny or serious, and it has to be acted—of course.” Corigliano builds the first act of “Ghosts” with such a range in mind, allowing several arias to move the story forward while still exposing what cannot be done through dialogue. Figaro (sung in the premiere by Gino Quilico) has a scena to rival that of Marie Antoinette’s in epic nature and to complement Rossini’s “Largo al factotum” in charm and showmanship. Bégearss (performed by tenor Graham Clark) has one of the greatest villain songs in “Oh the lion may roar, and the eagle may soar,” and Samira (embodied by no less than Marilyn Horne) brings the show to a halt with the showstopping “I am in the valley and you are in the valley.”
Yet for these intimate moments, the problem of “Ghosts” was its grandiosity in size and scope that, according to the composer, “worked against it for getting other productions. People said it was just too big: War and Peace–plus.” For the Met’s version, there was a full orchestra in the pit for the ghosts and a Monteverdi-sized orchestra onstage in costume to accompany the bouffe. A production in Chicago, picked up before the opera even premiered, scaled back on the orchestra due to the narrowness of the stage.
Corigliano once again revisited his score to ensure “Ghosts”’ deserved posterity. The premiere of the reduced “Ghosts” was at Opera Theatre of St. Louis, which features both a small pit and small stage. “The synthesizer played a role in the original version,” says Corigliano, “but the synth now plays a bigger role because we’ve diminished the orchestra size.” Adamo also helped his partner with double-casting to bring the number of people onstage down to make what was once a grand opera bouffe of epic proportions now, in the composer’s own words, a “very doable production for a moderate-sized opera house.”
It’s no surprise then that Adamo would be skilled at paring operas down to chamber castings. His first opera, Little Women, requires only 11 singers and can be performed in the smallest of spaces. Of course, it helps that Adamo was writing for the Houston Grand Opera’s opera studio versus the stage of the Met—but, as he notes, there were still pressures that came with his maiden voyage into the genre. Like Corigliano, Adamo did not consider himself an opera composer and, also like Corigliano, that self-perception changed when he received the commission. And while Adamo and Corigliano both had epic stories for source material, the challenges of adapting Louisa May Alcott were nothing like those of adapting Beaumarchais.
“I had remembered reading the book a long time ago and thought it was charming,” Adamo says of Alcott’s tale of antebellum sisterhood. “But [it was] the very definition of undramatic and quaint—in the best and worst senses.” Interestingly enough, “Ghosts”’s librettist Hoffman also found La mère coupable “dramatically weak,” though the approaches both composers took to resolving this issue are, as one would expect, vastly different. Corigliano and Hoffman added in characters, creating, as the composer describes in the program notes, “a world of smoke” that featured the titular ghosts of Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, and Beaumarchais. Adamo pares the characters in Alcott’s Little Women down, focusing on the March family—reunited after Gideon March’s return from the Civil War—and reducing the episodic nature of the novel to a tight dramatic arc. While Ghosts of Versailles is rife with nostalgia, both musically and thematically (an apt metaphor for the French Revolution, which sought to tear down and forget the past), Adamo examined Little Women without the veneer of wistful yearning.
Adamo got to the heart of Alcott’s story by determining what it was not. “It was not about a free spirit struggling against convention and it wasn’t about a blocked artist,” he says. “It was about a girl who had at a certain point in her adolescence a balance of personal freedom and emotional support that a lot of people look for in a marriage. And while she’s smart enough to know how wonderful that is, she’s not wise enough to know that has to change.”
The modernity of Little Women, therefore, lies in the idea of people outgrowing one another; a fresh concept for opera in general. While relationships often end in opera, Adamo points out (with a laugh), “generally consumption or revenge killing by knife are involved.” This also translated into the music for Adamo, who didn’t want to “dress up in Schumann’s castoff clothing.” Idiomatically, Corigliano balanced the nostalgic with the modern in “Ghosts” to show that, in Faulkner’s words, the past is “not even past,” a commentary in part on musical philosophies of the late 20th century. For Adamo, however, the balance of 12-tone rows and lush lyricism is used to illustrate character development and distinguish the conversations that propel the story along.
“When they’re singing in this kind of crisp, dry, and freely atonal recit, they’re still the same people,” Adamo says of his partner’s work. With that same atonal recit in Adamo’s hands, however, the composer saw it as a way to “distinguish different kinds of meaning, so that when tonality came in, it would enter the texture kind of the way a percussion entrance stands out if all you can hear are strings.”
Adamo goes on to add that he took inspiration from Marilyn Horne’s oft-used advice on using Mozart and Rossini to massage the voice during periods of vocal rough weather, describing the repertoire as one where a singer cannot park in one tessitura and is constantly floating through all areas of the voice, as if a role were its own vocalise. “I’d never heard of that music discussed in that way before,” Adamo says. “That was a technique that, as a composer, I thought I could learn. And so that’s one of the things that threads through the recit in Little Women.” For singers, the roles in Adamo’s operas are workouts, allowing descending minor sevenths to be as common as perfect fifths. In Adamo’s operatic world, the flavors may be as varied as those at Baskin-Robbins—from 19th-century Massachusetts to ancient Greece to the New Testament—but the vocal principles remain the same.
It’s perhaps fortuitous that, in this partnership, Adamo dominates one field while Corigliano steers another, though that’s not to say they don’t have mutual admiration for one another’s works when they do cross genres: “I heard [Ghosts of Versailles long before I met Corigliano] in revival, and I think I was sitting in row ZZZ,” says Adamo. “I remember turning to a friend of mine and saying, ‘See, this is the only composer out there who knows . . . where we are as contemporary audience members and is also [so] sophisticated a musician that the piece can be direct without being trite.’”
Little did either know then how their mutual admiration and unique skill sets would later come into play.
