New 'Tears' for your ears

'Everything is a matter of life and death' - Gerald Barry talks to Arminta Wallace about his new opera, 'The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant'.

Gerald Barry has had a dream. "In the dream," he says, "I go to a concert. At the door of the concert hall there's a man standing behind a tall desk. I go up to him and say, 'There's a ticket for me.' And he looks, and he says, 'There isn't a ticket.' I say, 'Well, I just spoke to the organiser today and he said there'd be a ticket.' And he says, 'There's no ticket.' I insist that there must be. So he takes out a gun and hits me over the head, making me lose consciousness." He laughs.

It wouldn't take a psychologist, let alone a rocket scientist, to work out what this particular dream is about. Barry's new opera, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, is to be given its world premiere in a concert performance at the National Concert Hall on Friday. Nervous? Who wouldn't be? But that's not why he's laughing. He's laughing because when he woke up, he found himself planning, in some detail, a court action against his imaginary assailant.

"Isn't that interesting? It's so . . . I don't know. Vengeful. Perhaps I should have been a lawyer," he says. When he laughs, curling into himself and covering his mouth with his hand, Barry looks anything but vengeful. On the other hand, he doesn't look like a "composer", either, with its echoes of wigs and quill pens and general quaintness. "Yes, it's a funny word, 'composer', isn't it?" he says. "If somebody asks me, I never say I'm a 'composer'. I say I write music. Or that I'm a musician." On a table in the front room of Barry's red-brick terraced house are the libretto of the aforementioned opera, a painting on a canvas frame and several sheets of note-covered manuscript paper. On either side of the window sit a couple of lamps, their shades made from more of the same manuscript pages, artfully rolled up - creative composition of another kind, and a reminder that the word "composer" actually derives from the Latin con ponere, which means "to put together".

According to this definition Barry is a composer par excellence, his music celebrated for what one critic has called its "extremes of juxtaposition"; jolts, sudden shifts and unexpected contrasts. The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant is a case in point. A lesbian love affair might not seem like an obvious subject for an opera, but the moment Barry encountered Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play of the same name, he knew he wanted to set it to music.

"It's incredibly funny, and very bleak," he says. "It's also incredibly gripping; the predicament of this woman who invests everything she has, emotionally, in this other woman. So literally, it's going for broke, no holds barred. That's definitely what I aim for. But that's just my nature. For me, almost to a ridiculous extent, everything is a matter of life and death. When things go right, it's wonderful. If they go wrong, it's like Petra, it ends in tears. Bitter tears," he adds, with a lopsided grin.

Where did it begin, this interest in making up music? "At the age of 11," Barry says without hesitation, "I was struck. Like St Paul. I was turning the dial on our radio at home in Clare, and I heard this amazing voice singing Handel. And it was like some angel appearing to me. I was, literally, struck with fire." Having grown up in a house which had neither piano nor record player, it was several years before he felt able to translate his conversion experience into musical action. "I bought records, but had no means of playing them. The first record I bought was Beethoven's Emperor concerto. I used to take the vinyl disc out of its sleeve and look at it, smell it. I can still remember the smell of it. I used to run my hand round and round it, as if it were a needle." Then he began to take piano lessons in Ennis, with a teacher called Patsey Callinan. "For 15 minutes she would play my records for me and then, for 15 minutes, teach me piano. In the end she mutinied. Fifteen minutes a week, she said, wasn't enough to learn the piano."

Those early encounters with music have clearly played a seminal role in Barry's musical imagination. He still composes by hand, eschewing sophisticated compositional software; perhaps those old vinyl discs, with their tactile grooves, really did - quite literally - give him a feel for music as artefact. Certainly, he insists that his childhood is a crucial component of his creative life. "My childhood is very important to me," he says. "In fact, I always feel like a child. The whole business of growing up - or that strange word, mature - doesn't mean anything to me at all. My brain is incredibly charged by childhood memories." These can be summoned up by something as innocuous as the red light of a recording studio. "I was doing a radio interview the other day, and it immediately reminded me of the lights we used to have on our Christmas tree. It was in the hallway, and you could never go there because it was freezing. You had to run from one room to another, and when you went up the stairs you had to go like this" - he squashes his arms tight against his sides - "because the house was incredibly wet. There would be water streaming down the walls, and this Christmas tree glowing in the icy cold. I so wish that I could have those lights now, but you can't get them. They were made of very heavy glass, so the light glowed - a cobalt blue one, a red one." He spreads his hands in apology. "Things like that set me off," he says.

In a way, though, isn't that what composition is? The setting off of musical light bulbs? Well, yes - though the old truism about art being 99 per cent perspiration is, as far as Gerald Barry is concerned, uncannily accurate. "The older you get, the more difficult it is to come up with ideas," he says, "because you're more aware of everything - of how good things need to be. When you're young, you're in a welter of energy. You just do things, and the energy takes over. When you get older you get more suspicious of the energy, constantly checking it to see that you haven't been deluded; fooled into thinking something is wonderful when in fact it isn't. When you're younger, though, you have luckier breaks. In one sitting you can be offered - from somewhere - a concept for a whole piece. Handed to you on a plate. It happened to me in 1979 and 1981." I look at him to see if he's joking. He isn't. Barry's publisher, Oxford University Press, lists him as the composer of more than 50 pieces of music including two full-length operas, The Intelligence Park and The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit. Yet inspiration, strictly speaking, has only struck twice? He holds up a finger. "Actually, no. It happened to me again two years ago," he says. "I got an idea from the bottom of a packet of tea." French tea, admittedly; herbal, by the sound of it. "It said that it would be very good after une journée agitée," he says. "And I got the idea for a piece called L'Agitation des Observateurs, le Tremblement des Voyeurs. I can't speak French, but it's such a wonderful language - you can say brilliant things without being able to speak it at all. That piece came to me almost completely formed. But that's really rare. Normally you have to work incredibly hard."

Much of this work is of a solitary nature; but once a piece is written, it depends on performers, conductor and, in the case of opera, singers, designers and director to bring the music to life. Barry speaks with enthusiasm of good performances which, he says, revitalise the music, even for the composer. For example, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Gerhard Markson did "a fantastic job" when they gave the second act of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant its world premiere in 2002. At a premiere, not just the music but the composer, too, is on public display. "There's nowhere to go," says Barry. "I mean, soloists have a room where they can go to get away from people, but for composers . . . I've ended up going into the loo and sitting in a cubicle until the interval ends, so I don't have to talk to anyone.

"And then there's the thing about people having to be polite about something you've written. The worst thing is when people are polite and you know they're lying. No, that is not the worst. That is bad - but the worst thing is when somebody feels that their opinions are so important that they must let you know in some oblique way what they really felt."

What would he do, if the shoe were on the other foot? "If I cared for someone, I would lie. It's not the time to say, you know, 'Gosh, that was poor.' Nor is it the time for mealy-mouthed praise. Either you lie in some warm way, or else you disappear." Is it true that most new pieces of music never make it to a second performance? "Yes - now, that's a vexed question," says Barry, "because most new music, I don't like. In fact, I hate it. I never go to music festivals, for instance. But that's completely normal. What composers do people remember now, from the 18th century? Beethoven; Schubert; Mozart. Where are the rest of them? So you could say that a lot of music doesn't deserve a second performance. It finds its way to some quiet rubbish bin, and belongs there. That has always been the way. On the other hand there is some music that does deserve to be heard, but isn't. There's a miserable history of that in music. You can't - well, you can complain about it, but it's pointless. One of the composers who suffered most from that sort of thing was Berlioz. He died before his greatest opera, The Trojans, was ever performed.

"The ironic thing, of course, is that poor music is performed all the time. People love it. If you take a historical perspective, you find that people love it for a while and then it just fades - but unfortunately, for a good composer, the popularity of that bad music can eat into the space that good music would have occupied. Because there are only a certain number of niches or slots where they stick things in. So somebody who is consistently too radical, or too daunting, or whatever, could be edged out. He will have his time eventually, there's no doubt about that, because good things always rise, but . . . " He shrugs. "He could be dead by then," he concludes.

The music of Gerald Barry, by contrast, appears to be very much alive and kicking. English National Opera will open its autumn season in London with The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, which will subsequently be released on CD by RTÉ; The Intelligence Park is also due for release in the autumn. Barry himself is regularly referred to by such sobriquets as "leading", "foremost", and so on. In terms of contemporary classical music this, surely, constitutes success. Does he feel like a success? He shakes his head. "Not really, actually. I think people just latch on to phrases like that, and they get repeated, you know?"

He grins his lopsided grin. "I spend most of my time," he says, "looking out the window."

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant is at the National Concert Hall, Dublin on Friday May 27th. The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra will be conducted by Gerhard Markson, with soloists Rayanne Dupuis, Mary Plazas, Stephanie Marshall, Deirdre Cooling-Nolan and Sylvia O'Brien