Despite its conventionally sentimental conclusion, most of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost is a laugh-out-loud satire on the foibles of an American family given to treating the super-sensuous world of ghosts with pragmatic litigiousness, patent medicines and miracle cleansers and lubricants. Gordon Getty’s opera based on the tale uses much of Wilde’s text verbatim but comes across more like the standard Gothic drama that Wilde was satirising. The humour is all there on the page, and perhaps on stage the slapstick indignities directed at Wilde’s hapless ghost register as farce. On recording, however, it feels as if the singers are trying to project comedy in the musical spirit of Owen Wingrave or The Turn of the Screw.

Getty, now in his eighties, is the billionaire son of J Paul Getty but has evolved into a serious composer with a particular affinity for opera. The Canterville Ghost was premiered in Leipzig in 2015, on a double bill with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. The composer crafted his own libretto for the work, adding an opening scene in which the young couple – the American ingénue Virginia and her eager aristocratic suitor the Duke of Cheshire – are seen many decades later, speaking to their great-grandchildren. The rest of the story is told in flashback.

Getty’s musical language is conservative but colourful, but his text-setting, with frequent large leaps across consonant intervals, tends to the monotonous. The orchestra responds mainly with expostulation – harpsichord tremolos, a piano glissando and emphatic passages with strings in unison or parallel with other instruments. But there are a few more elaborately and more effectively composed scenes, including scene 6, in which the happy family strategises about how to deal with their unwelcome cohabitant at breakfast, and scene 19, which reprises some of the same material.

The works builds to a tender and wistful romantic-comedy conclusion, with pleasing strophic passages and a fine duet for two of the cast’s best singers, soprano Alexandra Hutton and tenor Timothy Oliver. Bass Matthew Treviño is also effective as the churlish but not unsympathetic Sir Simon, who feels obliged to haunt Canterville Chase with professionalism and consummate theatrical integrity.

Matthias Foremny conducts the Leipzig Opera and Gewandhaus forces effectively, though one wishes that the musicians had more to do. Getty has created a lean, fast-moving, vocal-friendly theatre piece, but it could sparkle a lot more than it does.