TV OPERA REVIEW : ‘The Ghosts’: Skillful Yet Lacking

The first Metropolitan Opera world premiere in a quarter century, John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles” juxtaposes the final days of the doomed French queen, Marie Antoinette, with further adventures of the rascally Figaro, hero of previous operas by Paisiello, Rossini, Mozart and Milhaud.

Nine months after its wildly successful introduction to the Met repertory, this sprawling, spirited and relentlessly clever lyric/ buffa epic comes to television tonight in a three-and-a-quarter-hour taped performance on PBS: 8 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15, 9 p.m. on Channel 24. James Levine conducts.

William M. Hoffman’s libretto ricochets between the ghost world of aristocrats killed in the French Revolution, the world of theatrical fiction where Figaro is initially found and the ostensibly real world of history.

At its core, however, this is an opera about opera. Not only is an opera involving Figaro its centerpiece, but most of its jokes and musical allusions are about opera, and the key premise insists that opera can change life--and death.

“I have the powers of a god,” declares the author Beaumarchais (Hakan Hagegard) to his fellow ghosts, promising that his new opera--composed and produced in the afterlife--will undo an event that has already taken place: the execution of Marie Antoinette (Teresa Stratas).

Beaumarchais’ opera assigns Figaro (Gino Quilico) to rescue the queen, but the rogue soon defies his creator’s intentions--like many operatic characters in postmodern stagings. Eventually the living, dead and fictional all meet and sort out their destinies.

A virtuoso pastiche based on the final play in Beaumarchais’ Figaro trilogy, the opera-within-an-opera guarantees plenty of buffa escapades just as the threat of the guillotine in the grim historical episodes mandates push-button sympathy. Unfortunately, Corigliano’s score doesn’t deepen the situation or the characters, but concentrates on providing a distinctive sonic environment for each of the three worlds.

For the ghosts, he supplies skittering, generic modernism; for history, a lush, energetic, Straussian sentimentality, with the music usually placed very high in the voice. For the characters familiar from operatic adaptations of Beaumarchais’ “Barber of Seville” and “Marriage of Figaro,” there are so many quotations and references that the unseen Rossini and Mozart become more prominent than any of the ghosts portrayed onstage.

Midway through, Corigliano and Hoffman launch a high-camp, pseudo-Turkish diversion with Figaro dancing in drag while Marilyn Horne, no less, impersonates an Egyptian cabaret singer. Deliriously overextended, the scene is intended to be a show-stopper and director Colin Graham piles on the spectacle--including an enormous Pasha effigy that looms over the stage, singing, clapping, rolling its eyes and finally exploding.

Although his staging is stronger in such effects than in its acting, Graham keeps a potentially static work constantly on the move. Designer John Conklin proves equally resourceful, and the final scenes increasingly depend on them as Corigliano’s music grows thinner, soggier and more timid in the crucial prison reconciliation ensemble and multiple declarations of love.

Among the dozen principal roles, the vigorous Quilico and the melancholy Stratas make the strongest impressions--although television director Brian Large invariably uses close-ups of Stratas at exactly those moments when she’s projecting an emotion at theatrical (rather than camera) scale.

Graham Clark, Stella Zambalis and Renee Fleming also sing impressively--the last two in a beguiling passage adapted from (inspired by? developed out of?) Mozart’s sublime “Voi che sapete.”