Smash hit

Analysis of Wainwright’s trajectory has tended to concentrate on his musical heritage as the son of the singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle (and, of course, the brother of Martha) at the expense of his own gifts and absorptions. His arrival on the music scene

in 1998, as a motor-mouthed, major-label, big-money signing helped to create a perception of him as a fast-­living, bumptious wunderkind, vacuuming up every temptation (alcohol, crystal meth) placed in his path, and coming by the songs he wrote just a little bit more effortlessly than was good for him.

That his album sales never remotely matched the levels of hype he generated, or the ecstatic reviews he received, seemed at first like a setback. Yet that arguably bought him the room to succeed. He had been sucked into the orbit of the mainstream, where he never truly belonged. Freedom, artistically, to roam is much more his métier. Wainwright may never be calm, but he has learnt how enjoyable and fruitful it can be to feel content, and Prima Donna is one result. “I’ve always struggled with the confines of pop music,” he admits, “the videos, photoshoots and all of that stuff. I was dying to say, ‘Let’s work on something that’s just about music.’ And that’s what I’ve always loved about opera, that it’s really just about music. Plus I love the fact that the waifish leading female character is actually often fat, that the lover is older than the mother, all that.”

That last remark may be authentically, waspishly Rufus, but he is, for all his drollery, possessed of surprising amounts of grit. This year’s Manchester International

Festival is premiering Prima Donna, but it was originally commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, in New York, with which Wainwright fell out when its director, Peter Gelb, questioned his desire to write the libretto in French and wouldn’t commit to a production until 2014. “There was a moment of tragedy when it first went wrong,” says Wainwright, “but then a few days later I thought, ‘My God, this could be the best thing that ever happened to me.’ You know, someone else wants to put it on, but more important, it was turned down by the Met, and that’s going to go down in history. People love a comeback kid, and this opera now has cachet.”

With time running out, we return to the subject of the reception his first opera may receive. “I did this press thing in New York,” he says, “and there was this one writer, he wasn’t a big fan of mine, who wrote something like, ‘Just as long as the opera is not as overbearing as his songs’. And I was like, ‘Wait a minute, this is opera.’” He confesses that he feels both terrified and excited about the prospect of the first night, but only semi-cares, he insists, about whether his new direction is taken seriously. “I would definitely own up to perhaps having played up too much to the whole dandy, wounded, gay persona, and that certainly didn’t help. But I have infused this work with its own life. I have shot it out there, maybe with its own little safety capsule, beyond the lugubrious mothership. My mum has always gone, ‘Why are you talking about all that other stuff, why are you acting like this? Just do your music.’” Well, now he has.

Prima Donna opens July 10 at the Palace Theatre, Manchester

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