Maria Callas once commented: “An opera begins long before the curtain goes up
and ends long after it has come down. It starts in my imagination, it
becomes my life, and it stays part of my life long after I’ve left the opera
house.” Her words convey resignation as powerfully as they do pleasure. On a
blustery day in Leeds, Rufus Wainwright looks equally conflicted. In front
of the Canadian-American songwriter, the orchestra of Opera North prepare
for a run-through of Act II of his first opera, Prima Donna. The man long
associated, however unfairly, with frippery and froth, for ever perceived,
to quote Bertie Wooster, as laughing down from lazy eyelids, today looks
both exhausted and uneasy. A creased polo shirt, an old pair of jeans,
scuffed Converses, an unkempt beard and messy hair present a picture far
removed from the impish, provocative glamour puss we once tagged him as. “I
was up at 3.30 this morning,” the 35-year-old announces. “But only because
of jet lag. No, really.”
The sentiments expressed by Callas are ones that will resonate with
Wainwright, who first entertained ideas of writing an opera more than 20
years ago, as a teenager in Montreal. They are also apposite because it was
while watching an excerpt from The Callas Conversations — in which the
soprano discussed her career with Lord Harewood — that Wainwright finally
hit upon a story he felt could channel his operatic aspirations.
“There was this one moment,” he recalls, speaking after the rehearsal, “where
she said, ‘And that is what it was to be the prima donna.’ The minute I
heard that, the whole story just fell into my lap, like a ton of bricks. I
was like, ‘Of course, that’s it. An opera about an opera singer.’ I can
relate to it. As a singer, I know that world. And it could be a way for me
to use a lot of these great classical sounds and ideas that I love, and have
them make sense; because until then I’d had real trouble figuring out
situations where it would be plausible to have these Ravelian flourishes at,
say, a gas station. There is something so iconic and eternal about ‘the
singer’.”
Enthusiasm and ambition are not, in themselves, guarantors of a worthwhile or
accomplished end result, and Wainwright’s slightly nervy demeanour on the
day we meet suggests he is mindful of what may await Prima Donna when the
critics get their teeth into it. Utterances such as “Opera seems to have
been hijacked by intellectual elements” are unlikely to appease those
already suspicious of a pop singer working in the classical field. “By far
the sharpest and most vitriolic criticism I’ve received is from the
classical critics,” he says, “in the cases of the little pieces I’ve done
before this. (His most recent foray was his musical settings of Shakespeare
sonnets for Robert Wilson and the Berliner Ensemble earlier this year.) It’s
like there is this immediate crackdown on anyone who attempts it. On the one
hand, yes, that’s terrible, but on other, you laugh. Modern opera has become
quite useless, in terms of who is listening to it, discussing it and
absorbing it. It’s gotten so select.”
His attitude to such hostility might best be described as a
(characteristically) combustible mix of bullishness — as in the sweeping,
even reckless statement above — and fear. The Squirrel Nutkin in Wainwright,
unable to resist goading figures of authority (in this instance, the opera
establishment), is visibly doing battle with an unfamiliar caution and
apprehension. But old habits die hard. “I think,” he continues, his eyes
sparkling with mischief, his words punctuated by the trademark cackle that
always heralds a choice remark, “that we are at a point where there is a
crack appearing, and I can enter; maybe because the audience is on the brink
of death, so they have no choice but to let in some new blood. I was invited
to perform at the Verbier festival last year, and I sang a couple of Berlioz
songs from the Nuits d’été. The reaction from certain people was one of
horror. You know, it was an act of sacrilege on my part. Granted, I
understood what they meant, in terms of my being able to really hit the
notes, to fill the room. I can’t do that. But they weren’t prepared to
entertain another aspect of it, that I was maybe adding something. The
disconnect is just so great.”
Daniel Kramer, the American director acclaimed for his production of Harrison
Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy at the Young Vic last year, certainly believes
that Wainwright is “adding something”. The 32-year-old has been working on
Prima Donna with the songwriter for almost a year. “It’s Rufus,” he says of
the opera. “It’s all his voice. One of his greatest strengths is that he
knows how to write for the human voice, emotionally, in accessible melodies,
which is why I have hopes that the work will appeal hugely to young people
and get them excited about opera. It’s all there. He hasn’t lost that, he’s
expanded it.”
The challenges that opera presents to a musician accustomed to writing three-
or four-minute vignettes — albeit, in Wainwright’s case, of a rare
vividness, complexity and resonance — are obvious. It may be possible
to detect, in past songs of his such as Poses and Natasha, phrasing that in
its length and span owes more to classical singing than to the pop
tradition, but this does not in itself mean that a move by Wainwright into
classical music was inevitable or desirable. A gift for melody and
narrative can yield gems within the pop format — with its concentration on
brevity and immediacy — that may, over an opera’s far greater length, be
exposed as mere paste. I sensed that easily the most clamorous cause for
anxiety on the part of the team watching the run-through I attended was not
the music, but the opera’s dramatic heft, stamina and verisimilitude. Kramer
hints at this when he says: “Part of my brief, definitely, was to develop
the opera, or to develop a production that would maximise the dramatic
aspect of the story. It was Rufus’s first time telling a story over the
course of two hours, his first time developing fully fleshed-out characters,
relationships that have an arc, that grow. But while I have really expanded
— can we not say ‘expanded’? — really maximised the dramatic
aspect of the opera, there haven’t been tons of shifts. He was able to
maintain his vision. And he is a one-man band, that man. He is
uncompromising.” “I may,” the composer himself suggests, “have bitten off
way more than I could chew.”
Prima Donna’s libretto, a four-hander that focuses on the attempted comeback
by a once world-conquering diva, Régine Saint Laurent (sung by the Scottish
soprano Janis Kelly), and her romantic infatuation with — heaven forbid — a
journalist, is as infused with longing, regret, hubris and caprice as any of
Wainwright’s songs. In the aria Quand j’étais jeune étudiante, Régine looks
back, Callas-like, at a life in thrall to music, of unquestioning obedience
to its demands. “La musique décidera,” she sings: “Music will
decide”.
Wainwright’s own experience of such immersion has been less structured, but
there is an unmistakable element of returning to the fold, both in his
decision to write an opera and his contention that, in doing so, he is not
reaching for gravitas, but moving into territory he began mapping out years
ago. “I had a sort of awakening at the age of 14, with Verdi’s Requiem,” he
says. “That was the work that propelled me into opera and began it all. I
devoted myself to it and spent a lot of time in pursuit of a story and the
idea of eventually writing operas. And I went to music school, but I kind of
ended up hating everybody and wanting to hang out with drug addicts instead.
(Another wicked chuckle.) So of course I left, and put the composition
career, the opera, on hold. I certainly didn’t want to practise. I had
better things to do. But I was always returning to it. Going to the opera,
listening, dissecting them constantly and putting the inspiration into my
songs. I never really let go of the idea, but I didn’t want to get stifled
by the establishment, so off I went.”
The recklessness, nervous energy and manic edge that have propelled Wainwright
towards some of his greatest highs and most notable lows are clearly audible
in his score. Musically, his first opera captures all sides of his
personality, one minute incapable of staying still, fluttering and
fidgeting, picking up a scent that proves to be a false trail; the next
subverting itself, often with shocking brutality. In the fugal overture to
the second act, the frenetic, Tippettian strings and the ascending brass are
suddenly mired, to devastating effect, in dissonance. In Quand j’étais jeune
étudiante, the cyclical, arpeggiating violins are interrupted by rumbles of
brass and cello, conveying Régine’s feeling of cataclysmic loss. The
interlude’s opening, Beethovenian string quartet is ambushed by descending
woodwind, which are in turn stalked by glacial violin, building to a huge
orchestral swell that shatters into silence without warning. And in
Prenez-le donc, the becalmed but euphoric opening sequence for strings is
violently interrupted by chilling glissandos.
The opera is decidedly and emphatically not the work of a dilettante, or some
over-reaching experiment that has gone horribly wrong. It may owe clear
debts to, among others, Mahler, Massenet and Berlioz (and, as that list
implies, be musically fairly promiscuous), but it is convincingly a piece into
which an enormous amount of time, knowledge, emotion and commitment has
gone. Pop’s enfant terrible has, it seems, become un homme (semi)sérieux.
The man who once sang “I’m tired of writing elegies to boredom”,
and whose work sometimes seemed so suffused in ennui that it had lost the
will to live, has discovered a means of communicating that replaces
jaundiced detachment with absolute conviction.
“Opera is my religion,” he says at one point. “My temple.
Still, to this day, the highest moments in my life have been experienced at
the opera; there’s this certain plateau I hit that is like a religious
affair. So I feel a duty to appease those gods and to add to the canon.
Because it saved my life in many ways.”
