The adventurous London company plans to launch its 2005-6 season with Gerald Barry's take on Fassbinder, reports Michael Dervan
When Gerald Barry's The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant opens English National Opera's 2005- 2006 season, at the Coliseum in London next September, it will be the first time the company's work will bear the full personal stamp of its Derry-born artistic director and chief executive, Seán Doran, who took up his post in April last year.
Barry's setting of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder play - once memorably described as a "Sapphic haute couture bitchfest" and which Fassbinder also directed as a film - is not the only new opera of the ENO season. February 2006 will also see the première of Asian Dub Foundation's first venture into opera, taking Col Muammar Gadafy, the Libyan leader, as its subject. (The project, which will be directed by Peter Sellars, prompted the group's guitarist, Chandrasonic, to remark: "Opera used to be the music of the establishment, but no one else would do a project like this. If I went to a record company with this idea they'd never look at it. They are the conservatives now.")
Doran's choice of Barry's work, he says, came from "a combination of the respect and response I've had for Gerald's work for quite some time. I remember so vividly when his Chevaux-de-frise was done in the BBC's Proms. It really impacted upon me. I have always felt Gerald's voice to be so courageous in its individuality. It's just got a freshness to it."
Barry's previous operas, The Intelligence Park and The Triumph Of Beauty And Deceit, were written for voices with small ensembles. "I believe his work will have a wider appeal in a large-scale venue," says Doran, who in the case of the new work had the advantage of being able to listen to a recording of the concert première of the second act, which was commissioned by RTÉ and performed by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under Gerhard Markson in September 2002. "I felt the force of the writing and the passion about this piece that's so important to him. You could hear it immediately."
For Doran the work is in a certain sense "a gift", as it came into existence with no prompting from ENO - a concert performance of the complete opera is already scheduled to end the current RTÉ NSO subscription series, at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, in May. "It's quite a coincidence, an opera by an Irish composer opening my first season. He's really regarded him as one of new music's original voices over here."
Doran is optimistic that he will get the attention of the large audience for other contemporary art forms and turn their heads towards new opera at ENO. The secret in attracting that audience into the opera house, he says, "lies in the boldness of experiment, the boldness of gesture. To play safe is the biggest risk you could run in ENO". He's hoping that his programming will act as "a rallying cry to our core audience to support us at the beginning of our season, to buy into the risk and join the contemporary-arts audience that we would want at the staging of Bitter Tears".
For Barry the ENO staging - as well, indeed, as the NSO concert performance - is a spectacular reward for the tenacity with which he has written the opera. He had been introduced to the Fassbinder play by Vincent Deane, who wrote the libretto of The Intelligence Park. And, once he'd read the play, he knew he wanted to turn it into an opera. "I was going to do it by hook or by crook," he says. He nurtured the idea for years, with no prospect of performance or commission. RTÉ originally approached him to write a concerto for orchestra. "I said, no, I had no interest in that. I said they could commission one act of Petra, I was interested in that. That's how the composition of it began."
After the Dublin première, Act II was also heard at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival the following November, when it was well received by British critics. The live recording of the NSO's performance was available for promotional use, and it was this recording that eventually tipped the balance for Doran at ENO.
"It's an amazing play," says Barry, "not a single extraneous thing in it. Not one word." And, unusually, his opera sets every word of the original play. That decision, he says, was clear from the start. "It never once occurred to me to cut it. The text is all so extraordinary.
"The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant," he says, "is a love story: ecstatic, moving, gripping, obsessive, funny, heartbreaking, filled with tenderness, hatred, jealousy, compassion. It is one of Fassbinder's most powerful plays and films."
