‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ Opera

WHEN JOHN CORIGLIANO’S opera The Ghosts of Versailles premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera just before Christmas 1991, it was immediately hailed as one of the major musical events not only of the year but of that still-young decade.





Chateau De Versailles from the Garden Side, Before 1678

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The run sold out immediately. In the courtyards and foyers of the Met, opera lovers begged for tickets. In the box office, they drew up a waiting list. Inside the house from the first night on, reported the New York Times , “there was the kind of excitement rare at opera premieres.

Listeners walked up the aisles at the intermission discussing their favourite arias and ensembles”. It had arrived, said the critics; the great new American opera they had been waiting for, and it had come courtesy of a New Yorker, a Brooklynite, who had never written an opera before.

Nor has he written one since. There have been more than 100 scores – symphonies, concerti, film scores, works for voice, orchestra and electronics – and there has been huge acclaim; as the awards lined up on the mantel of his Manhattan studio testify, Corigliano is, at 71, one of the most significant composers working in the US today. There’s an Oscar there, for the score to Francois Girard’s The Red Violin (1997). There’s a Bafta for the score to an earlier film, Revolution, in 1986. There’s the Grawemeyer Award for his Symphony No 1 (1991), a powerful elegy for friends lost to Aids, and there’s the Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No 2 (2001). And there are three Grammy Awards, among them the gong Corigliano won in 1999 for the recording of Mr Tambourine Man , his vocal work based on the lyrics of Bob Dylan.

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