Thirty years after its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera, The Ghosts of Versailles has come home in more than a literal sense. The stage that once put on opéra-ballets by Lully and Rameau plays host to John Corigliano’s time-travelling comedy, in a co-production between the increasingly impressive local company and the Glimmerglass Festival of New York State.

Like children, operas aren’t always born where they belong or in their own skin, and it may take decades for their truest selves to be realised or recognised: think of Tannhäuser and Les Troyens. What once seemed artful and yet ultimately artificial about both Corigliano’s music and the libretto of William F Hoffman – episodes of neoclassical pastiche dropped into the composer’s modern-Romantic idiom, the elegant dismantling of the fourth wall as Beaumarchais enters his own play to alter its course, the powder and perruques which any staging seems to demand – now takes on a much more confident and sharply defined personality.

The composer’s cuts play their part, as they did in the LA Opera staging recorded by Pentatone (6/16), in freeing the piece from the trappings of excess that hang heavy over the film of the Met premiere (DG, 8/93, presently on YouTube) and disentangling the narrative threads knotted round the central character of Marie Antoinette. More significant still in advancing the metamorphosis of what Corigliano originally conceived as a ‘grand opera buffa’ into something more nearly resembling the Figaro operas of Mozart and Rossini is the cunningly reduced scoring, which John David Earnest prepared in 2008 for smaller stagings in St Louis and Wexford.

Led by six-to-a-part violins, the string-writing in the prelude glistens and shimmers. Neoclassical, expressionist and post-Romantic styles lose the lingering odour of parody and begin to speak (or sing) the same language. This refining process even brings together the formal and demotic elements (‘Silence, bloodsuckers!’) of Hoffman’s libretto that critics found hard to reconcile back in 1991. And, inevitably, the pitch-perfect Dangerous Liaisons costumes, gestures and designs look right at home in the renovated Opéra Royal at Versailles.

Joseph Colaneri’s conducting deserves much of the credit, pointing up the most disruptive harmonies while giving the singers their head in the lyrical ensembles that come to dominate the piece. The cast is young but assured, led by Teresa Perrotta’s silver-topped singing as the queen and Jonathan Bryan’s firm, ardent baritone in the role of Beaumarchais, both movingly coming to terms with their place in history as the opera’s action whirls around them; among a huge supporting cast, Christian Sanders makes a tireless and vocally grateful high-tenor villain as the Irish major Bégearss. In his preface to La mère coupable (the opera’s main source material), the real Beaumarchais declared an aim of ‘moral hermaphroditism’ – writing with the cool head of a man and the burning heart of a woman – and in both its audio and video formats, this recording establishes a non-binary identity for The Ghosts of Versailles that should win it many new friends.