Somebody asked me to write an opera. I wasn’t expecting that. Being asked to
write an opera is like being asked to demolish a power station or go in a
rocket with Al Pacino: it’s not something you’d ever expect to do in your
lifetime. You’ve got to say “yes” no matter the amount of trepidation that
soon follows once you’ve agreed.
So for the past five years, off and on, I’ve been involved in writing an
opera. Just the words. I have no musical ability. I can’t sing, whistle or
clap in anything resembling rhythm. My piano stalled at Grade 1, so I’m
doomed to go to Hell with nothing more to cheer up the occupants than the
ability to play The Farmer Wants a Wife. But I enjoy writing and I
love classical music, so when the composer David Sawer asked me to write the
words to his newly commissioned opera I said yes, despite my niggling
misgivings about opera.
You see, I’ve always been a pretty fundamentalist believer in classical music,
but rather agnostic about opera. From the moment my music appreciation
teacher let his worn stylus drop on to a crackly vinyl recording of Holst’s Planets
and the speakers blasted out Mars: Bringer of War at full volume down
the school corridor — enormous, frightening thumps, like Morse code tapped
out by tanks — I’ve been sure that classical music is the most emotionally
involving, intellectually satisfying and mind-bendingly brilliant form of
noise humankind ever created. Debussy can sound erotic, Stravinsky can sound
pagan, Shostakovich tells us what happens to emotional life battered by
state dictatorship.
I’ve always proselytised to others about the power and passion of classical
music; it’s not the effete twiddlings of a few rich counts in Bavaria
wearing wigs and hiring their own court composers to come up with stuff to
dance to, as if they were some sort of human iPod. Its range is wider than
the exclusive image we have of music written for a rich elite. Coming from
an Italian family, I’m used to seeing burly men in cafés singing their heart
out to recordings of Verdi and Puccini. I’ve seen how passionate and furious
can be the arguments over who was the greatest tenor and if anyone rated
higher than Beniamino Gigli, like football fans in a sports bar coming to
blows over Arsène Wenger.
And yet I always carried a guilty misgiving. With Verdi and Puccini and
Rossini pumping away at home on my dad’s stereo all weekend, and with my own
driving obsession with classical music, why was it that in the end I simply
wasn’t grabbed by opera? I couldn’t come to terms with it. It sounded like
warbling, the great arias and choruses seemed stitched together with
aimless, shapeless half-hours of musical mush signifying nothing. I read the
stories. They were silly. People die as soon as they fall in love, mostly by
being stabbed. Or falling off tall buildings. There’s probably an opera
where someone dies by falling off a tall building on to a stabbing incident.
This was all nonsense, I thought.
I wasn’t thinking straight. I didn’t rationalise that the same silly plots
turned up in much of Shakespeare and that somehow I was able to cope with
the Bard perfectly well. I didn’t really give opera a chance. It was only
when I did so, going to see La traviata put on by Scottish Opera, or
an amazing Tristan and Isolde at the Coliseum in the early Eighties,
that I realised that opera is there not just to be listened to out of a pair
of speakers, but experienced live and at full blast. Listening to a
recording of an opera is like trying to judge architectural merit by looking
at the shadow of a building. There’s more to opera than just the sound.
There’s the lighting, the set-design, the costumes, the directing. It’s a
fusion of art and literature and drama, fashion and showbiz. When it all
comes together, it’s the best art there is.
Seeing it live, you are overwhelmed into total submission. You end up telling
your friends who’ll happily pay £80 a fortnight to stand in the rain and
watch highly paid footballers get trapped off-side, that it’s neither
elitist nor demands technical knowledge. Trouble is, there’s so much that
can go wrong in an opera — the scenery can wobble, the soprano can trip, the
horns can parp out of tune — that there’s every chance you end up seeing
something laughable.
I put my frustrations about the absurdity of opera into a sketch for my
Channel 4 series The Armando Iannucci Shows. In it, I attend a
performance at Covent Garden of Ibiza Uncovered: the Opera, in which
we mounted a full-scale modern production, with trained opera singers rather
too old for the parts singing in their bathing trunks about shagging and
going to Manumission to see Paul Oakenfold on the decks. The exceedingly
good opera director Richard Jones saw it and later told me that it reminded
him of some of his own productions. He mentioned this at my first meeting
with him and Sawer. As soon as I knew I was with people who saw both the
silly as well as the serious side of opera, I realised I was with the right
people.
More so when they told me the topic. They were keen to come up with an opera
about plastic surgery. As we talked it was clear that we were heading in the
same direction: something about society’s obsession with looks, with fashion
and even with fame. We were talking before Nip/Tuck became a TV hit,
and before stories regularly appeared in the UK papers about parents giving
their 18-year-old daughters tummy-tucks as birthday presents. But we felt
that the subject was ready for expansion and ridiculous explosion and I’m
glad we’ve stuck with it.
Composers such as John Adams have shown how opera can be a commentary on
contemporary culture: he’s written great pieces on Nixon, Mao, the atomic
bomb and terrorism. Skin Deep is a comic operetta about a subject
that has come to dominate our public life and private behaviour: appearance.
From the politician who wears a baseball cap because he thinks it might look
cool to a the worker who nips out one lunchtime for a quiet Botox, the
increasing pressure on us to worry about what others will think of the way
we look is the pandemic of our time.
Maybe this is a personal thing. Maybe, since I listened to classical music as
a teenager while others went stabbing or to Pink Floyd concerts, and maybe
because I never gave a moment’s thought to what I wore while others broke
their neck falling off platformed shoes, just maybe this is my personal
obsession. But I’ve always felt the style and fashion police to be utter
bullies. The urge to mass–market appearance is only a step away from
mass-marketing opinions and lines of thought. Being pressurised to look cool
is a sliver away from being urged to think cool as well. And cosmetic
surgery celebrates physical manipulation to the worst degree; it’s turning
your bones into a clothes rack for skin and your body into an ad for
designer ears. It’s the triumph of marketing over chromosomes and seemed the
perfect subject for some musical theatre.
And so I’ve spent the past five years collaborating on what many people would
tell us is that uncoolest thing, an opera.
We’ve gone into the whole tradition we love and yet find bordering on the
ridiculous — the star-crossed lovers, the mistaken identities, the tragic
heroine — but tried to make them heartfelt. We have face-swaps, people
falling in love with their own reflection, others searching for the key to
perpetual youth, and many left abandoned with looks they don’t like. And
we’ve tried to keep it funny and pacey. I’ve had to knuckle down my ego and
remember that the words are just one aspect of a whole, unified production.
Anyway, it’s always a useful constraint on the ego to wallow in a line you’ve
written only to be told that it needs to be four syllables shorter. You
realise that you are there to service the music, not the other way round.
Your words are like costume and scenery; part of a larger experience. For
the collaboration to be complete we need one more vital component: an
audience. Next Friday we’ll find out how well they, and everything else,
work together.
Skin Deep opens on Jan 16 at the Grand Theatre, Leeds (0870 1214901) , then
touring. www.operanorth.co.uk
