About the work
Opera in two acts by John Corigliano to a libretto by William M. Hoffman, first performed on 19 December 1991 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The Met had commissioned the work as early as 1980 for its centennial; composer and librettist took roughly a decade to complete it.
Plot
In the afterlife, the ghost of Marie Antoinette is bored at an imagined court of Versailles until the equally deceased playwright Beaumarchais stages an opera for her based on his own play La Mère coupable. In it, Figaro tries to save the Almaviva family during the French Revolution of 1793, while Beaumarchais promises the queen he will rewrite history for her.
Cultural significance
A 2015 Los Angeles Opera recording of the work won the 2017 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. The opera thus continues the Figaro material of Mozart and Rossini via Beaumarchais's third instalment of the trilogy.