By Wexford standards John Corigliano’s 1991 opera was a leap into the unknown. Wexford is, after all, the festival that has thrived on exhuming operatic obscurities from the distant past. Some turned out to be worthwhile, others to be stinkers – but Wexford’s sense of adventure, allied to the charms of the town and its back-street theatre, always made the trip worthwhile. Last year saw the opening of a splendid new opera house and with it the idea that Wexford must compete with festivals that have sprung up with similar repertoires. The danger is that, by joining the herd rather than sticking to its time-tested values, Wexford loses its powerful brand identity.

The recession has set Wexford back: this year finds the performance run cut by a third. More damaging, though, is the decision to join the international co-production snake, the process whereby companies reduce costs by sharing a staging. Would Wexford have bothered with The Ghosts of Versailles if it hadn’t found a co-producer in St Louis, Missouri, where this production was unveiled in June? On the surface Ghosts looks adventurous: a European premiere of a relatively new opera. But judging by Wednesday’s performance, it marks a dilution of the Wexford ethos.

A time-travelling fantasy about Beaumarchais, his Figaro characters and the ghost of Marie Antoinette, Ghosts has one of the most trivial, pointless plots I have encountered. The music, cleverly put together, is a medley of every operatic style under the sun. The characters are so hackneyed and artificial that you end up wanting to strangle them. Worst of all, Ghosts panders to a popular American notion of what opera is about: something dead and European, full of powdered wigs, flouncy costumes and characters so camp that they must be cute.

Corigliano’s brief was to make something stand up at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where a new work had not been performed for 25 years. He had to create enough stand-alone arias, however inane or sentimental, for the string of operatic “stars” that would give the show credibility at the Met box-office. And he had to give his audience music they could relate to, so he filled the score with pastiche. Opera has a long history of pastiche: think of the Italian tenor in Der Rosenkavalier or the soprano/mezzo duet in Act Two of The Queen of Spades. But these are isolated quotations that have a dramatic function within a wider frame. Ghosts has so many musical ghosts – from Mozart and Wagner to Britten and Broadway – that it ends up with no personality of its own. It’s a musical masquerading as an opera – a quiz-opera intended to reassure any half-educated audience that, yes, they can spot the allusions.

Into this soufflé Corigliano and his librettist William Hoffman stuffed no fewer than 14 principal roles, plus lots of small solo parts. Wexford cuts the score and reduces the orchestra, though we still hear synthesizer and harpsichord. James Robinson’s staging, designed by Allen Moyer and conducted by Michael Christie, is sensitively tailored to the intimate proportions here: everything is clear, so even Corigliano’s instrumental “ghost” interludes, his one original touch, make their mark. The cast, led by Maria Kanyova’s Marie Antoinette, George von Bergen’s Beaumarchais and Kishani Jayasinghe’s Rosina, is not one of Wexford’s talent shows. For that, tonight’s performance of Donizetti’s Maria Padilla may prove a happier hunting-ground.