No characters in the history of opera are better- known or more beloved than the two lovers Count Almaviva and Rosina, and the irrepressible barber, Figaro, who helps bring them together.
The three meet in Rossini’s farce, “The Barber of Seville,” continue their romantic ups and downs in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and return in a kind of flashback in Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles.”
Staging the three operas as a set and watching the lives of the characters evolve might seem like a natural, but no one has attempted it until now.
The Aspen Opera Theater Center, a preprofessional training program at the Aspen Music Festival, is the first company anywhere to present what it is calling the Beaumarchais Opera Trilogy.
After a gala kickoff earlier this week, the series begins its regular run Saturday with “The Barber of Seville” and concludes with the final performance of “Ghosts” on Aug. 21 — one day before the end of the festival.
“It’s like an operatic miniseries. It’s quite a progression,” said Edward Berkeley, who has led the opera theater center for about 25 years.
He is also quick to admit that this inventive grouping is a sly way to entice audiences leery of contemporary opera into giving “Ghosts” — a 1991 work that was revised slightly in 2009 — a chance.
“I don’t even know if it’s very sly,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious. One of the things we’ve done a fair amount of is try to do new operas and try to get audiences into them and excited by them.”
Although Almaviva, Rosina and Figaro recur in all three operas, the pieces were written in different centuries and in disparate musical styles.
“Because you have some of the same characters and relatively similar situations coming up, it’s a matter of how to really, really keep them distinct and have the personality of each piece remain very specific,” said Berkeley, who will serve as stage director for the trilogy.
To convey a sense a continuity among the three works, John Kasarda (his credits include art direction for the 2003 television mini-series, “Angels in America”) has designed a basic structure that will undergird the scenery for all of them.
But each production will have its own look, with the sets for “Ghosts” being the most complicated, because it involves an opera-within-an-opera, with Beaumarchais returning in the afterlife to create a new work to cheer up Marie Antoinette, who remains upset about her beheading.
While the principal characters stay the same throughout the trilogy, the singers portraying them will change from production to production.
“We’ve joked about it a fair amount, because the first Rosina is a relatively shorter person, and suddenly the second Rosina is extremely tall and, then, in the final one, we come to someone of more average height,” Berkeley said.
The opera center theater involves 70 or so singers — ages 17 to 30 — from across the world, and all will participate in some way in the trilogy. They range from high-school students to apprentice singers on the cusp of professional careers.
These budding talents might lack experience or fully formed technique, Berkeley said, but they make up for it with the youthful zest they bring to their performances.
“The excitement is that they are discovering roles and characters and music for the first time,” he said.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
Beaumarchais Opera Trilogy.
Opera. Wheeler Opera House, Aspen. The Aspen Opera Theater Center at the Aspen Music Festival presents the first-ever presentation of a set of operatic adaptations of three 18th-century Beaumarchais plays featuring the same group of famous charactersCount Almaviva, Rosina and Figaro. Saturday and Monday, Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” July 31, Aug 2 and 4, Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and Aug. 19 and 21, Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles.” All at 7 p.m. $82, $25 obstructed view. A pass to all three is $189. 970-925-9042 or .
