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Life & Arts

Moores' complex opera will haunt you

Intricate music, storyline merge in performance for France's dead queen

by CHRISTIAN OCHOA 
The Daily Cougar 

The Moores School of Music will play host to ghosts this weekend. 

The Ghosts of Versailles, which is the School of Music's latest opera, features a complex plot -- an opera within an opera. 

Members of the French aristocracy, including the infamous Queen Marie Antoinette and her husband, King Louis XVI, along with other ghosts, haunt the palace at Versailles. To help Antoinette get over the brutality she faced during the French Revolution, Pierre Beaumarchais, a commoner who is in love with the queen, puts on an opera about a complicated family. 

"Well, the opera itself is not easy -- its not done very often. It's difficult for everybody involved," said opera graduate student Zachary Wilder, who plays Leon in Beaumarchais' opera. 

In Beaumarchais' opera, family relations get complicated when Leon falls in love with his stepsister, Florestine. Their father, Count Almaviva, refuses to give consent for the marriage and instead gives Florestine's hand to the villain, Begearass. 

Besides featuring two operas in one show, The Ghosts of Versailles, which marks the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Moores Opera House, is sung in English along with surtitles and will also include characters that fly. And, to the surprise of some, a favorable depiction of Queen Antoinette will be included. 

"(The opera) depicts her as having not known any better when she was living in the palace. She refers to herself as a ‘golden bird stuck in a cage of silver trees' in her opening aria," Wilder said. "No one deserves dismemberment."

Composer John Corigliano, who wrote the music for The Ghosts of Versailles, also served as a coach as he worked with performers for the University's production since the comedic tragedy is hardly ever done because of it's complex instrumentation. 

"The opera is rarely seen. It's complex, gigantic and fantastic," Wilder said. "It's so big. It almost isn't idiomatic to the stage. It's cinematic -- but it works." 

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