An interesting conversation took place during the first concert performance of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant in Dublin last May, between the composer Gerald Barry and Richard Jones, who is directing the staged premiere at ENO.

It went something like this: Jones: These repeated ostinatos seem to come back a lot. Does that mean the characters are locked into unchangeable kinds of behaviour? Barry (deadpan): No, not at all. Jones: Um. Does that mean the music was written before you saw the words? Barry: Why yes, of course.

“I felt a bit Mrs Merton-ish,” says Jones, a genius director with an engagingly haunted, eeyorish air. Barry clearly took some delight in pulling the rug out from under him — the last person successfully to write words to pre-written music was probably Lorenz Hart. Was the composer, a bluff Irishman from Clare, simply winding Jones up?

“Well, Richard can be very intense, you know,” Barry says affectionately, “and he goes round making these snap analyses like a kind of psycho-police; sometimes you have to deflate him. But I do collect a bank of sounds, and had it all laid out in front of me, so when I came to the text I had a whole array to choose from. That doesn’t mean I’ve simply slammed the text on pre-existing music.”

You couldn’t mistake Barry’s music for anything else: stubborn, brassy, chords going this way and that in unison or counterpoint, usually refusing to meet in any traditionally happy way, it has a relentless exuberance that is exhausting and euphoric. Now he’s written this opera — his third — to a text by Rainer Werner Fassbinder: a piece of gloomy introspection about a self-obsessed 36-year-old fashion designer and her screwed-up lesbian relationship with a chavvy twentysomething model no less frightful and exploitative than herself, which the author turned into a memorably claustrophobic film in 1972. The story is a thinly disguised autobiography of one of Fassbinder’s own self-hating gay relationships, neatly re-sexed to allow lashings of misogyny.

It makes for a weird combination. In Dublin half the audience sat in shock as the orchestra blasted away like a psychotic Sousa march while the ladies on stage mouthed the often inaudible words (it will be surtitled at ENO). But the cumulative effect was strangely gripping. You began to find your way back into this bizarre world, bizarrely painted. Barry’s music might put you through the wringer, but you feel a palpable exhilaration, and not just of the hair-shirt kind. But why do it at all?

“Yes, a lot of people have asked me that,” says Barry. “I simply felt compelled to do it. It seemed right — it’s incredibly funny, incredibly bleak, the emotional range is so huge. No pragmatic matters entered my head, like how would it be possible to convey this text in its entirety. I just wrote it the way I felt bound to, and I hope people will come to terms with it and find enough meat to want to come back. People do take things on trust if they are gripped emotionally.”

One thing not immediately obvious is whether the music in any way illustrates the words, as one jaunty and abrasive show-tune succeeds another above the navel-gazing text. “It’s not psychological,” says Jones. “I’m not sure it’s telling a completely different story, though Gerald might pretend it is, in some very modernistic way.” Naturally, Barry calls the bluff here: “Sure, the music’s not illustrative in a conventional way but if you go deeper it mirrors the way people are thinking — you can often say one thing and think something totally different. I’m a very emotional person and the music is very emotional: it mirrors me. So no matter how strange the juxtaposition seems, I am responding to the text, and no matter how I’ve arrived where I have, I want to serve whatever’s happening emotionally, and to have maximum theatrical impact. Actually I think my music’s very melodic and accessible — not a million miles from Rosenkavalier.” (Those who wish to test this theory can buy the CD, just released by RTÉ, who commissioned the work jointly with ENO.)

Even though it has no elaborate sex-scenes, the basis of Barry’s opera is as erotic as any by Handel or Strauss. “We also thought about presenting the characters as drag-queens,” says Jones, who studied the trannie Kemal from Big Brother 6 with great attention. “It goes beyond gay: it crashes the queer barrier, as well as sort of saying: ‘This is what will happen if you’re one of them’.” “Some of the audience will feel nauseous after ten minutes, or held hostage, or will giggle. But Petra shows how people sometimes behave, and it’s my job to present these relationships in all their hilarity and horror and addiction and nastiness and humanity — and to give the audience a good evening out.”

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant opens tonight at ENO 020-7632 8300

Page 2: Opera’s campest moments ()

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UN BALLO IN MASCHERA Riccardo's affair with Amelia is an obvious cover for trysts with Oscar the page

L'INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA Nero and Lucan whoop it up an unseemly manner to celebrate Seneca’s suicide

FIDELIO Opera’s Cell Block H: junior screw Marzelline falls for Leonora when she drags up to rescue Florestan

GENOVEVA Golo, clearly in love with his boss Siegfried, can only express his tortured passion by framing Siegfried's wife for adultery

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