Interview No 1: André Previn
WHAT WAS YOUR STARTING POINT?
Brief Encounter, the film itself – a tale of doomed love – inspired me to compose the opera. I always thought it was perfect. It’s beautifully written, directed and acted. There’s scarcely anything to add – though of course the score has to be a force of its own.
HOW DID THE TRANSFORMATION WORK?
The adaptor and director John Caird and I had to make major decisions. Should we bring in extra characters? Should we see Alec Harvey’s wife or just Laura Jesson’s husband? We used both Coward’s stage version Still Life and his screenplay. The main point of contention, of course, is do Laura and Alec consummate their affair or not? There are good arguments on either side…
WHAT ABOUT THE LIBRETTO?
We have the same characters as in the film: Laura’s husband – to whom she imagines she is confessing her affair with Alec – and also her children. And the railway staff have to be there, of course! As with the film [released in 1945], the opera is set loosely in the period in which Coward wrote it [1936]. My first opera was A Streetcar Named Desire and Tennessee Williams’s words aren’t exactly a synch to set but Coward was even more difficult. Streetcar is larger than life, very melodramatic and operatic. Brief Encounter is a very small, intimate and British piece of theatre. Vocal lines seemed to arise naturally from Coward’s words.
HOW EASY IS IT FOR SINGERS TO DISPLAY REPRESSED EMOTIONS?
You’d need to ask Elizabeth Futral [the American coloratura soprano who sings Laura) and Nathan Gunn [who takes the baritone role of Alec]. In the film it’s simply the way they are that makes their encounters, though brief, so touching. People today rip their clothes off! These people do not wreck their marriages, or have a screaming, flaming affair. They just love each other and then it is over. Someone once said that what’s too impossible to say can always be sung so perhaps emotions hinted at in the film’s spoken dialogue will surface in the opera.
ARE THERE ECHOES OF RACHMANINOV?
I couldn’t let the film’s existing music influence me. It would take away from the thematic material of the various characters and the setting. But it sure had an important score in Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto.
ANOTHER OPERA BASED ON FILM?
My next opera - about which I already have some ideas - is not based on a film.
Interview No 2: Poul Ruders
WHAT WAS YOUR STARTING POINT?
After seeing Lars von Trier's crushingly sad film Dancer in the Dark, I staggered from the cinema, clobbered by the emotional impact. ‘This is the ultimate operatic subject!’ I thought. Then, six year later, the Royal Danish Opera approached me about a third opera. I quickly “de-frosted” the Dancer in the Dark idea. Henrik Engelbrecht, chief dramaturg at the Opera House, embraced the idea enthusiastically and agreed to whittle it down to a workable opera libretto.
HOW DID THE TRANSFORMATION WORK?
We decided to focus solely on the main plot revolving around Selma’s [played by Björk in the film] problem with her deteriorating eye-sight and her struggle to earn enough to provide her son with the operation which would save him from also going blind. What follows is pure emotional manipulation – the perfect operatic subject!
WHAT ABOUT THE LIBRETTO?
Henrik produced a first draft, then we started working on it together. After five drafts we were both satisfied, and I started composing the music. As with The Handmaid’s Tale I was dealing with a victimized woman as heroine, so I guess there were some similarities in my approach.
WHO’S WHO AND WHAT’S WHAT?
Kasper Bech Holten, artistic director of the Royal Danish Opera, will be responsible for the staging. I started working on the score with no particular cast in mind. But we soon decided on the Swedish-born dramatic soprano Ylva Kihlberg for Selma, and the Danish baritone Palle Knudsen as Bill Houston, the policeman. The opera, sung in English, takes place somewhere in the American North-West in the early 1960s.
WHAT KIND OF MUSIC?
The opera score is totally different from Björk’s film score (which is amazingly good, by the way!). Now and then Selma “disappears” into her dreamworld of famous old musical productions, which spin her to and from her native Czechoslovakia (as it was in her youth). We couldn’t get permission to use Björk’s texts, so Henrik wrote original words which are so touching they would make a vulture weep!
IS BJÖRK LOOKING OVER YOUR SHOULDER?
Nope! It’s all my music, and although it’s probably the most predominantly tonal score I´ve composed, nobody could possibly find any similarities between Björk and me …
ANOTHER OPERA BASED ON A FILM?
… Only if it hit me out of the blue, as happened with Dancer. I’d never go chasing the subject. The story must always find the composer. Think of Tosca, Salome, Wozzeck … three plays that pole-axed Puccini, Strauss and Berg. And what operas!
Interview No 3: Daniel Catán
WHAT WAS YOUR STARTING POINT?
I identified immediately with Il Postino. The film’s theme, the role that art plays in giving meaning to our lives, recurs in my work. Parallel to this was another strand: the relationship between an older, famous artist like the exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (one of my favourite poets) and the aspiring young islander, Mario. Through their relationship I could explore the theme from both ends of the spectrum.
HOW DID THE TRANSFORMATION WORK?
Radford and his co-adaptors drew on the novel El cartero de Neruda, ('Neruda's Postman')] by the Chilean writer Antonio Skarmeta. I had great sources from which to chisel out a libretto.
WHAT ABOUT THE LIBRETTO?
I changed some things in the novel/film and combined others to make the story as operatic as it needs to be. Antonio was very trusting but I still sought advice over the structure from writers who specialise in scriptwriting. The word-setting came very easily in this opera, perhaps because I wrote the libretto as well as the music and because this is my fourth opera. I’ve composed for film before, but writing an opera, however, is very different and infinitely more challenging. I did manage to include a bandoneón in the wedding sequence, by the way!
WHO’S WHO AND WHAT’S WHAT?
Ron Daniels is directing. We both hate gimmickry and he approaches opera from a deeper level. The cast was always going to include Placidó Domingo in the role of Neruda and Rolando Villazón as Mario. It helped me to think of the lovely timbre of these two tenors, and I was eager to write a duet for them. This is the centre-piece of Act 1. The island setting, still in 1950s Italy, is important to me. The sea is a constant reference in the story as well as in Neruda's poetry.
WHAT KIND OF MUSIC?
Luis Bacalov’s original soundtrack, is lovely and so well done! But writing for opera is very different. I needed to demonstrate Mario's development as a person in music. How do you capture, through singing, someone who expresses himself badly? The emergence of the character in the opera was the great challenge for me.
ANOTHER OPERA BASED ON A FILM?
Yes, if a story appealed to me and involved research in fabulous places such as Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, Italy, France, Spain, China, Japan … so I could combine my work with my passion for travelling and experiencing new places and cultures.