Opera, according to former drummer of The Police, Stewart Copeland, is “the apex of the composer’s world”.
“Writing a pop song is great fun,” he explains as part of our transatlantic chat – him in rainy California, me gloating in sunny London – “ but it’s only a three minute nugget. Writing for film is also very rewarding, but film’s a director’s medium and the music plays a very rewarding, but supporting, role. In opera, music drives everything and the composer is God.”
When you put it like that, why would any musician not want to be involved with ROH2’s OperaShots season, which this April teams Copeland’s take on Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart with The Doctor’s Tale, a collaboration between The Art Of Noise’s Anne Dudley and Monty Python’s Terry Jones.
The season is, explains the Alison Duthie, the Head of the Royal Opera House’s contemporary arm ROH2, “an opportunity for composers who are established in other fields to have a go at opera”. Hence the involvement of Copeland, best known for his pop work but also a Golden Globe-nominated composer of soundtracks, ballets and a couple of operas, and Dudley, who has produced music for Elton John, Pulp and Phil Collins and won an Oscar for her soundtrack to hit Brit film The Full Monty.
The fabulously enthusiastic Duthie sees the season as a chance for these opera newcomers to “push the boundaries of opera as an art form and see where it goes; play with it and have fun with it”.
In creating their short pieces, Copeland, Dudley and Jones have been doing just that, the former delighting in finding a way to bring Poe’s Gothic monologue of a murderer’s guilt to the stage, while the latter pair delve into a score for the tale of a canine doctor that includes howling dogs, a patient going ‘Aaaaaah’ and a secretary typing.
Though OperaShots is clearly conceived to create something different to the traditional pieces so readily and stereotypically associated with a night at the opera, this remit seems far from the minds of those working on the project.
“It’s not a mission to write a new Mozart piece and emulate what’s gone before,” Copeland explains. “Nor is it the other extreme of let’s go in there and let’s turn everything that’s been done before on its head and burn down the walls of convention. It’s just trying to do something that’s cool and exciting, fun, interesting, moving, whatever. Something that works.”
Jones sums it up more succinctly with the classic writer’s response: “I just sort of wrote the kind of thing I’d like to see really.”
The effect, obviously, of creating a new type of opera is that you get a new type of audience. The composers and writers bring their own fan bases, of course, but, says Duthie, the “culturally curious” and those “interested in new work” are also drawn to OperaShots. The crowd, she suspects, are also regulars at “Sadler’s Wells, the South Bank Centre and the Barbican”.
It helps that the evening’s entertainment comes with an inclusive top price of just £20.40. “It’s really important to us that people feel they can take a risk and have a good night out. Of course, with something like OperaShots, they’re actually seeing incredibly experienced and exciting artists as well. It’s a nice combination to be able to do the two things.”
Copeland, with the flourish of a rock star, is less concerned with exactly who the audience is: “That’s kind of the concern of the institutions, the opera companies and so on. For little old me, the composer, I just want to write stuff that I think is cool that folks will like. I’m not that bothered whether people who are coming also like musicals, are mainly into pop music or rock or are opera buffs. That’s for other people to worry about. The composer is really just concerned with doing something really cool, really interesting, really exciting and using the true sensibilities that they bring to the party.”
It is a touch surprising to discover that classical sensibilities are no new thing for Copeland: “Even during the punk years, even during the rock ‘n’ roll years, I’ve always had orchestral music surging through my brain.” He remembers walking the streets of Covent Garden decades ago, while recording in the Jubilee Studios, thinking that the “Royal Opera was somewhere that the living composer would consider to be off limits.” So he is delighted to have been welcomed inside its hallowed walls. “What a great operation. They just have the best people there and the best resources, the Rolodex from hell for pulling in talent to work on anything. It is a real Rolls Royce ride.”
Jones is in total agreement, revelling in the fact that he, as director, has had very little to organise, as the staff of the Royal Opera House have taken care of all the little details. “The singers have been brilliant too. They’ve pointed out some of the weak points in the plot in some scenes and come up with solutions for them.”
But what, I wonder, is the goal of OperaShots? Clearly audience development plays a part, with recognisable artists bringing in an intrigued crowd who may not normally attend an opera, but what about a future for the short shows? “That’s not absolutely the point,” Duthie says. “The point is to have a really interesting mixed programme of these sharp, funny, political short operas that an audience can come in and really enjoy, but if something does have that potential substance to take forward, then yes, we’re interested in doing that.” In fact, there has already been interest from “other venues” in the future of last year’s pieces.
It would be glib to describe OperaShots as an overnight success, but in just its second season, the programme is already expanding. A third opera, based on Bonnie Greer’s appearance opposite BNP leader Nick Griffin on Question Time is in development and will be staged in November. “It will get to the point,” Duthie enthuses, “where we’re developing things at different times, not always in parallel. It won’t always be two or three playing at the same time, because sometimes things need a little bit longer.” The trio of composers who will join the programme in 2012 has already been decided and will be announced later this month.
“I hope [the composers] have a good time with it,” Duthie concludes, “because I think they’re suddenly working on something which is very much their creation. They are the driving force.”
Certainly Copeland is having a ball, and though he may be creating a very different piece to those usually associated with the Royal Opera House, he has not forgotten his forerunners. “I suspect the reason for this order of the hierarchy with the composer at the top is this way because most composers are safely dead. The ones who are still quick with the living get to reap the reward, the hard-earned reward for the efforts of Mozart and Wagner.”
MA