Tales from the opera

SHORT STORIES: ARMINTA WALLACEreviews Midsummer NightsEdited by Jeanette Winterson Quercus, 329pp. £18.99

THIS IS ONE of those publishing ideas which must have seemed simply spiffing after a couple of bottles of champers and a bucket or two of strawberries on the lawn at Glyndebourne.

Why not celebrate the 75th anniversary of the ultimate stately-house opera festival by getting some of the best writers on the modern fiction scene to produce an anthology of opera-inspired stories? The brief to each writer, as Winterson explains in her introduction, was simple: “choose an opera, and from its music or its characters, its plot or its libretto, or even a mood evoked, write a story”.

That’s the theory. In practice it’s anything but simple. Look at it from the reader’s point of view. You have the story, and you have the opera it’s based on – to which it may bear some resemblance, or none at all.

The opera, for its part, may or may not be familiar. Most of us can make a stab at La Traviata or Don Giovanni or The Marriage of Figaro,but how about The Makropulos Affair, or Ariadne auf Naxos, or La Fanciulla del West? "It doesn't matter whether the reader knows the source or not," Winterson claims. I can't say I agree.

What’s the point in these particular writers taking these particular operas and making clever, creative, sassily self-referential stories out of them if nobody knows what they’re on about? The presence of a lengthy series of “notes on the operas” at the back of the volume proves the point. But if you’re puzzling over what any of the stories might “mean”, ploughing your way through an opera plot synopsis, one of the most notoriously indigestible of all literary forms, isn’t likely to help much.

As it happens, the experience of reading this collection is in itself not unlike a night at the opera. Some of the pieces, notably those by Joanna Trollope, Andrew Motion, Alexander McCall and Winterson herself, are more workmanlike than inspired; the stuff of wry smiles rather than a standing ovation. Colm Tóibín and Anne Enright acquit themselves well, chronicling some unhappy obsessions in The Pearl Fishersand Key Noterespectively. Other stories – including both of the pieces based on The Makropulos Affair, one by Jackie Kay, the other by Paul Bailey – seem as interminable as Janacek's tale of the wretched singer who discovers the elixir of life and keeps on singing long after generations of fat ladies have died and gone to prima donna heaven.

But when the writing miraculously detaches itself from the somewhat artificial setting of the original inspired-by-opera concept and simply becomes inspired, Midsummer Nightssoars to some hugely enjoyable climaxes. Kate Atkins's take on La Traviata, in which a celebrity floozie seduces the future king of England – is cheekily contemporary; Kate Mosse's La Fille de Mélisande is a more knowing, artful affair, using colour the way music uses key.

As in the theatre, backdrops play a central role. Julie Myerson's The Growlerplaces us in the most seductive of Italian landscapes; Andrew O'Hagan does the same for Ayrshire in First Snow. And in an identity swap of which Rossini would be proud, we find some writers having a bit of fun with disguises: Ruth Rendell goes all Greeks-and-Christians with her historical fragment, Theodora, while Antonia Fraser's My Lovely Countessboasts the sort of murderous mayhem you might reasonably expect from Rendell.

I suspect that, as with opera, it will take time and repeated reading to fully appreciate some of these stories.

On a first encounter, however, two fairly leap off the page. Freedom, Sebastian Barry's amiable tale of an unlikely close encounter between the Irish tenor John McCormack and native American culture, works on every level – an even greater imaginative triumph, given that nobody could possibly be au fait with its source opera, Victor Herbert's Natoma.And Lynne Truss, of all people, completely steals the show with String and Air, and its two thrillingly malevolent cats, Miles and Flora.

If you know The Turn of the Screw, you'll laugh out loud. If you don't, you'll laugh out loud anyhow. Now that's what I call opera.

Arminta Wallace is an Irish Timesjournalist