OPERA : Phantoms of the Met : John Corigliano’s ‘Ghosts of Versailles’ will be the first American opera to premiere there in 25 years--but it faces a jinx

“It’s like getting the Hope Diamond--you know it comes with a curse, but you still want it,” says composer John Corigliano, referring to his first opera, “The Ghosts of Versailles,” which will have its world premiere at the Metropolitan Opera on Dec. 19.

The “diamond,” of course, is a debut in one of the most prestigious houses in the world; the curse is that only one world premiere there in the last 50 years (Samuel Barber’s “Vanessa”) has made it to even a second season.

“The Ghosts of Versailles,” the commission Corigliano received from the Met 10 years ago, is the first world premiere of an American work at the Met since Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra” and Marvin David Levy’s “Mourning Becomes Electra” in the initial season at the house 25 years ago.

Corigliano is luckier than his colleague, Jacob Druckman, whose 1981 commission for an opera based on the Medea legend was canceled in 1987 when no music had been received by the Met. In April of that year, Corigliano submitted his complete score, but there was no guarantee of production.

At the time, Bruce Crawford, then general manager and now president of the Met’s board of directors, said in an interview: “The people who make contributions to opera are not too excited about contemporary work.” That’s putting it mildly. Many influential board members are about as happy with the prospect of a modern work at the Met as they would be with a vagrant at a Rockefeller wedding.

Nevertheless, once music director James Levine gave his blessing and agreed to conduct, the Met showed support for the new piece, spending at the outset between $200,000 and $300,000 to do a workshop version and tape a performance with young singers and synthesizer, which will make the production easier. That’s in addition to Corigliano’s $150,000 fee and the production budget, which the Met declines to reveal.

The composer on whom so much money is riding is one of the most versatile and, perhaps more importantly, most performed artists of his time. He was published even before graduating from Columbia University in 1959, but it was his Sonata for Violin and Piano in 1963--written for his father, John Sr., then concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic--that launched his career.

Corigliano has written choral music, chamber music, song cycles, film scores (Ken Russell’s “Altered States”), theater music, and concertos for piano, oboe, clarinet and flute. It was the Clarinet Concerto in 1977 that put him in the forefront of American composers. His recordings are numerous, and not just on obscure labels.

Generally considered a musical conservative descended from the line of Barber, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris and William Schuman, Corigliano has produced tonal work in the main, but refuses to be pigeonholed. “Eclectic” is the adjective most used to describe him.

“I have never paid much attention to fashion; I think that’s suitable to clothing,” says the 52-year-old Corigliano. “My music hasn’t changed that much over the years, but the view of it has. Style is subtle and innate, technique is something else. Berg, Schoenberg, Kirschner and Schuller all used 12 tone as a technique, but their styles are completely different.”

Interviewed in his New York apartment, Corigliano is on the phone, frustrated by his inability to get through to Tangier to make reservations for a brief vacation before rehearsals begin at the Met. His febrile personality is evident.

“The whole thing began in the late ‘70s,” says the composer, “when Renata Scotto, then the reigning queen at the Met, asked me to do a concert ‘scene’ for soprano and orchestra which she wanted Jimmy Levine to conduct. We all had a dinner meeting, but Levine kept steering the conversation to my doing a full opera. The official offer came less than a year later.”

The terms were generous--on paper. Considering the time spent over the years, Corigliano wryly calls his commission fee “less than minimum wage.”

“I went to Billy Hoffman, with whom I’d worked on songs and choral numbers in the past. I told him I wanted something that would show a world of flux existing on three levels--ghosts, grand opera and opera buffa,” he says.

“The Beaumarchais trilogy, ‘Le Barbier de Seville,’ ‘Le Mariage de Figaro’ and ‘La Mere Coupable’ always fascinated me. We got an English translation of ‘La Mere’ and decided only to take the characters for the libretto.”

Hoffman, who had been a friend since their college days, says Corigliano asked two things: a libretto to justify the use of melody in a work of dreams, fantasy and ghosts, and a Turkish scene, since much of 18th-Century Europe was gripped by Turkomania. Both being admirers of the opera buffa genre, they created a new term for their project--”grand opera buffa.”

The librettist himself is about as versatile in his way as the composer. For his 1985 play, “As Is,” Hoffman won a Drama Desk Award, an Obie and a Tony nomination. He has written plays, books, poetry, screenplays and lyrics for musicals. He is in the middle of a play now that is a quasi-history of his family’s experience in the Holocaust. Hoffman is also one of the new writers for the soap opera “One Life to Live.”

“John is very dramatic; we screamed and shouted a lot,” recalls Hoffman with a laugh. “Once, I really thought I was going to lose it when he chopped two stanzas of what I thought were my best lyrics in a second-act duet.”

Once Corigliano and Hoffman worked out the story, the composer began, as he always does, spending a great deal of time on conceptualization by way of diagrams, colored charts and scenarios before a note was written.

From the beginning, Corigliano knew what voices he wanted for four major roles: Teresa Stratas as Marie, Marilyn Horne as Samira, Donald Gramm as Beaumarchais and James McCracken as the villain, Begearss. The men have since died. Hakan Hagegard and Graham Clark will take their place. The composer and the Met worked together on the rest of the casting.

Corigliano claims not to be concerned that many are worried about Stratas’ reliability, based on a history of repeated and arbitrary cancellations. “I think she realizes her responsibility,” says the composer. “It’s one thing to cancel ‘Tosca.’ It’s not going to harm the opera. Here it’s a different story. Besides, she’s been in on it from the beginning, even referring to it as ‘our opera.’ ”

Both Colin Graham as director and John Conklin as designer were suggested by the Met and accepted by Corigliano.

But things didn’t start too well. The present Met administration had never handled a commission before and it certainly wasn’t used to having interference in casting. Rumors abounded--suggestions that singers were being ignored or vetoed, the budget was being constantly whittled away, Levine had lost interest in the piece and Corigliano was desperately trying to place the work elsewhere.

The composer at first found difficulty getting the right person on the phone to answer a question. Finally, Joseph Volpe, the Met’s general director, appointed a liaison to whom all questions flowed. The situation improved rapidly.

Today, Corigliano denies there were any more difficulties than usual putting on a new work, dismissing the gossip of the sometimes vicious opera world as “typical.”

Corigliano is as flexible and realistic as his bel canto predecessors--Bellini, Rossini, Donizetti--in the 19th Century. He has told all the singers if they don’t feel comfortable with something in the music to let him know and they can work it out together.

Corigliano once said that to reach the public composers had “to get off their butts and write some tunes.” Today, he says evenly and confidently of the forthcoming opera, “you’ll hear some tunes.”

Such calmness from the usually hyper composer is not really surprising. This past year he has been on a roll, receiving the $150,000 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award--the largest of its kind in music--for his Symphony No. 1, premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in March, 1990.

Years ago Corigliano had said he would never write a symphony because no new ones were needed. His change of heart was caused by the suffering AIDS has wreaked on many of his friends. The subtitle of the first movement is “Of Rage and Remembrance.” The composer explained that rage can be political as well as personal in music.

“I am bitter toward those religions that say it is better to pray over the dying than educate children. The symphony came about because there was a need to say something. Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ was a highly personal statement by the composer (in part about his troubled marriage), but few in the public know that today. The music has to exist in the abstract also.”

The New York Times deemed the work “by turns anguished, hysterical and deeply moving . . . (it) may be the most brilliantly orchestrated show piece for a virtuoso orchestra since Bartok . . . full of an aesthetic coherence that could convince even one utterly ignorant of its inspiration.”

The Symphony was recorded live by Erato and is now No. 3 on the Billboard classical music charts. This season, it will be repeated by the Chicago Symphony and played on the orchestra’s world tour. It also will have first performances by the San Francisco Symphony, the Pacific Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the orchestras of Boston and Kansas City.

For his next project, Corigliano intends to compose a string quartet. “I want to go from a macrocosm to a microcosm,” he says.

He is pleased with the Grawemeyer Award and is undismayed that the most significant prize of all has eluded him: “I would love to win the Pulitzer, but I think I never will. I’m too much of a maverick. My Clarinet Concerto didn’t even come down to the finals, I was told.

“Still, it and many of my other pieces are played all the time. Some orchestras have repeated it (the Clarinet concerto) a number of times. Not bad for a modern work.”

Asked if he thinks his success and popularity have worked against him with his peers--David Diamond once said he and Corigliano were in ‘different worlds’ and Elliot Carter claims not to know his works at all--he finesses the question. He seems too much of a gentleman to get involved in internecine warfare.

“I think we are in a time of tremendous musical diversity now and that’s all to the good. Minimalism was an extreme reaction to another extreme--serialism. People like Philip Glass and John Adams have redefined the composer as a moneymaker and attraction, (they are) successes in the commercial world. I’m a composer, not a celebrity. Up to now, the industry has sold the performer, not the piece.”

Meanwhile, work continues on the commission for the Met, a process that has obviously caused Corigliano something resembling trauma. Asked if he will do another opera, he roars: “Hell no!”