There is a striking description of opera’s capacity to evoke overwhelming emotion in Iris Murdoch’s novel The Black Prince. Its middle-aged protagonist is watching a performance of Der Rosenkavalier alongside a much younger woman with whom he has fallen obsessively in love. Almost immediately the combination of swooning music and her presence lead him to be violently sick. An overreaction as staged as opera itself?

Possibly, yet as Jeanette Winterson comments in her introduction to Midsummer Nights, a selection of stories commissioned to celebrate Glyndebourne’s 75th anniversary, opera’s “necessary synthesis of words and music” makes it “potent”. The 10 writers she has gathered to endorse this view, and the operas they have chosen, are impressive and diverse. Kate Atkinson, Andrew Motion, Alexander McCall Smith, Ruth Rendell, Sebastian Barry, Toby Litt, Colm Toibin and Antonia Fraser among them tackle a range from Handel’s Theodora to Britten’s Peter Grimes.

Responses vary from the camp and the outré to the deeply personal (all appropriate to the medium). In typically bold style, Jackie Kay takes Janacek’s The Makropulous Case and grants its weary heroine, Emilia, a woman who has imbibed the elixir of life, an eventual evolution into the ­person of Ella Fitzgerald.

Ali Smith and Winterson’s offerings also deal — in deceptively nonchalant fashion — with shape-shifting. Smith’s Fidelio and Bess combines Beethoven and Gershwin, an ambitious melding that doesn’t quite hit the high notes, but the girl-masquerading-as-boy conceit parallels her ­characters’ illicit love affair to touching effect. Similarly, Winterson’s ­honeyed description of doomed passion with a “Goldrush Girl” plays out mournfully yet knowingly against the dramatic backdrop of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West.

It is disappointing that the contributions of the most seasoned authors tend towards the formulaic. McCall Smith transposes Così fan tutti’s test on the fidelity of women to a fancy-dress party in modern-day Edinburgh, while ­Fraser uses a jealousy-fuelled ­production of The Marriage of Figaro to reveal a deadly case of mistaken identity. To Die For, Atkinson’s account of the tawdry nature of 21st-century celebrity, pairs the tale of an exploited, drugged-up American actress with that of an unhappy couple watching a performance of La Traviata in Paris, but the two fail to cohere.

More convincing is Andrew O’Hagan’s First Snow where a no-nonsense Scottish feminist librarian opens up to Russian literature, love and memory in a moving meditation closely resembling the spirit of Eugene Onegin. The narrator of Toibin’s The Pearl Fishers is forced into a hostile reunion with a married couple with whom he once formed a rivalrous, uneasy triangle — the husband was his first lover. His disillusionment is compounded by the trio’s ambiguous interactions with a priest whom the female half of the couple, now a crusading journalist, seeks to expose in a vicious vendetta.

There are two well-crafted horror stories. Lynne Truss’s String and Air, a feline reworking of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, relays with grim humour the tribulations of a woman who unwisely names the cats she obtains from an animal shelter Miles and Flora, while Litt’s The Ghost is a chilling piece in which, to his father’s horror, a small boy moves from play-acting to taking on the actual persona of his recently dead grandfather.

Based on the vengeful Commendatore in Don Giovanni, Litt’s is perhaps the best piece in a book that gamely strives to remove opera’s elitist label. Informative notes by Margaret Reynolds along with a joyful Posy Simmonds illustration of a typical Glyndebourne audience complete the collection.

Midsummer Nights edited by Jeanette Winterson
Quercus £18.99 pp384

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