Sophisticated composer John Musto and witty lyricist Mark Campbell have done it again. Their highly anticipated comic opera, “The Inspector,” is about to open at the Barns of Wolf Trap. This comedy of errors built upon greed, graft and mistaken identity is Wolf Trap Opera’s second commission, both created by the Musto-Campbell team. After the success of “Volpone,” that first collaboration whose recording received a Grammy nomination, Musto and Campbell wrote “Later the Same Evening,” a jazz-infused opera inspired by five Edward Hopper paintings for the National Gallery of Art and the University of Maryland Opera Theater. Their third opera, “Bastianello,” was based on folk tales. It celebrated the 20th anniversary of the New York Festival of Song, where Musto’s concert songs receive frequent performances, and was followed by a Wolf Trap Opera Company production in 2010 with a cast of WTOC alumni.
Campbell explained the team’s decision to reimagine “The Government Inspector” by Nicolai Gogol, a play that delighted Czar Nicholas I for its satirizing of human greed and political corruption. The new setting is a small Sicilian town populated by scheming politicians who await a bureaucratic inspector dispatched by Mussolini.
