A few months ago I received a notification that John Corigliano’s phantasmagorical, convoluted, anarchic, wonderful opera within an opera, The Ghosts of Versailles was going to be performed at Northwestern University. I had seen the work performed once before at Chicago Lyric Opera, enjoyed it enormously then, and, consequently, I was delighted to buy tickets for NU’s student production of the work. If you’re not familiar with it, it is a combination ghost story, historical drama, love story, and Warner Brothers cartoon. I can see how some could find it frustrating but I love it. It is simply overflowing with fascinating ideas—like an explosion in the genre factory.
To summarize a complicated plot with as many major characters as a Chinese novel, the ghost of Beaumarchais wooes the ghost of Marie Antoinette by promising to magically restore her to life through the history-changing power of his grand new opera, A Figaro for Antonia. The opera includes the ghosts of Beaumarchais, Marie Antoinette, and Louis XVI, characters from Beaumarchais’s plays including Figaro, Susannah, Rosina, and Almaviva, French revolutionaries, and others that echo figures from grand opera, history, and, as noted before, Bugs Bunny cartoons. Confused yet? The music includes original modern music and snatches from other operas, French military music, folk songs, jazz, and others too numerous and interwoven to mention.
When my wife and I walked into Cahn Auditorium on Sunday afternoon it was for the first time in more than thirty years. Little had changed including, if I am not mistaken, the seats which I must admit were significantly more comfortable and spacious than Lyric Opera’s seats.
It was simply delightful. The scenery and costumes were professionally designed and executed and it was professionally directed and conducted. The student orchestra, performing the new reduced orchestration of TGOV, was marvelous, making fewer bloopers than the Lyric Opera orchestra if anything. I don’t know if you’ve ever attended a high quality college student production of an opera (I’ve attended a few) but my experience has been that what they may lack in finesse is frequently more than made up for in energy, enthusiasm, and boldness. The young performers don’t seem to be as afraid of making fools of themselves as more established one might.
Those qualities were present in abundance in the performance we say and I found those qualities in this work particularly felicitous. The Ghosts of Versailles is wonderfully suited to student production.
Standout performances included Kelsey Betzelberger as Marie-Antoinette, David Govertsen as Beaumarchais, and Corrie Stallings as the show-stealing entertainer at the Turkish embassy, Samira. Best of all was Casey J. Candebat as the hissingly villainous Bégearss, sort of a combination of Baron Scarpia and Snidely Whiplash. None of them could have been older than 24 years of age and I look forward to seeing all of them on the Lyric Opera stage. Well done!
My only regret about this fabulous production is that I didn’t see it on Friday evening so that I could have recommended that you rush to see it on Sunday. The house should have been packed. Alas, it wasn’t. Its all-too-brief run is over and Chicago opera-goers may not have the opportunity to see The Ghosts of Versailles for many years to come.
