Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in 1980, The Ghosts of Versailles blew past its deadlines and ended up taking Corigliano and librettist William M. Hoffman 11 years to write. The work has been a great success by contemporary opera standards, with productions by multiple major American opera companies, but it has been scarce on recordings, with only an out-of-print Met video and a live Los Angeles Opera recording preceding this sumptuous 2021 release, which includes both DVD and Blu-Ray discs in the physical release. ...
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Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera in 1980, The Ghosts of Versailles blew past its deadlines and ended up taking Corigliano and librettist William M. Hoffman 11 years to write. The work has been a great success by contemporary opera standards, with productions by multiple major American opera companies, but it has been scarce on recordings, with only an out-of-print Met video and a live Los Angeles Opera recording preceding this sumptuous 2021 release, which includes both DVD and Blu-Ray discs in the physical release. The plot involves three levels: one featuring ghosts of the Versailles court, including the executed Marie Antoinette, one with a performance of a play by Pierre Beaumarchais from the same trilogy drawn on by Mozart and Rossini in their Figaro operas, and one with historical personages of the French Revolution era. There are two orchestras, one for the opera itself and one for the play-within-an-opera. One can understand why the work's genesis was so long, for it, unlike almost any...
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