‘History As it Should Have Been’: Haunts of the Historical Sublime in John Corigliano's and William Hoffman'sThe Ghosts of Versailles

Abstract

AbstractIn John Corigliano's and William Hoffman's operaThe Ghosts of Versailles(1991), generic, musical, and temporal boundaries are dissolved, and historical processes revealed, resulting in a work that performs an operatic rendering of what philosopher Frank Ankersmit has referred to as sublime historical experience. As Marie Antoinette's ghost resolves her trauma by narrativising it in performance, and as music extends and dramatises the experience of the sublime, the audience experiences profoundly the liminal realm that historically-based operas inhabit in their movement between past and present. Indeed, the temporal suspension that is so central to theories of the sublime finds parallels in opera's historical obsession with death, and in music's ability to momentarily blur the boundaries between life and death, and past and present.The Ghosts of Versaillesallows for the audience's relationship to history to be revisited, reconfigured, and in many cases, reconciled, through a haunting of the present in operatic performance.