Markanth Ony Turnage finds himself in a curious position. Contemporary music's favourite East End bad boy, outspoken in his contempt for musical elitism, is well on the way to becoming a darling of the establishment when this week's world premiere of The Silver Tassie (adapted from Sean O'Casey's play of the same name) confirms Turnage as one of the finest opera composers of his generation.
The opera was commissioned 10 years ago by English National Opera after the huge - if highly unlikely - success of Turnage's first work for voices, Greek, a comparatively small-scale work based on Stephen Berkoff's reworking of the Oedipus story (originally commissioned for the Munich Opera by Hans Werner Henze, under whom Turnage studied).
The Silver Tassie has had a long genesis. It wasn't until Turnage saw the Abbey's production of Juno and the Paycock in London that he recognised in O'Casey's writing "a richness and musicality" which he thought would make "really interesting opera". But it was only with the chance discovery of The Silver Tassie in a student edition of collected plays, that he knew he had found his subject. It was another two years before he gave the play to Amanda Holden, his librettist - then an opera translator for ENO.
Arguably Greek succeeded through Turnage's ability to match Berkoff's abrasive yet lyrical language in the score, diluting neither his muscle nor his poetry. He was equally determined to retain The Silver Tassie's Irish identity, both in the libretto and in the music. "Because it's opera and opera takes longer to sing than words to speak, there are obviously lots of cuts and we have cut one character. Completely. It's just confusing for an audience if there's too much information with the music. But the spirit is still there. It's up to the music to put in the rest, the inner things. The emotional stuff has to be from me. And that is the difficult thing."
He was confirmed in this approach by O'Casey's daughter Shivaun, who has, he says, been "incredibly supportive". "Interestingly enough, she told me her father was disappointed with an opera based on Juno and the Paycock by Mark Blitzstein the American, because Blitzstein had been too reverential to the text. He'd used whole chunks of it and not cut it around. And this gave Amanda and me real confidence to make The Silver Tassie into an opera. It's a different medium and provided you've got the spirit of it, then that's what counts."
In the case of The Silver Tassie, Turnage believes turning it into an opera has added to the piece, rather than detracted. "The second act is so expressionistic that it seems to be part of a different play, and this was something many people had a problem with. What music can do is connect. I can bring back themes, thread things through which you can't do in a play. It gives the piece more cohesion."
Like O'Casey's original, the opera is set in Dublin during the first World War. Three young men are home on leave and one of them, Harry Heegan, manages to secure the silver tassie of the title by scoring the winning goal in a football match before embarking once again for the war in France. The expressionistic second act sees them in the trenches. When the curtain rise on the third, we are back in Dublin in hospital. Of the three friends, one is blinded, while Harry, the goal-scorer, is paralysed, his bitterness compounded when his girl rejects him for the friend who saved him, the only one of the three to emerge unscathed.
The Silver Tassie is perhaps best known for being the play that Yeats rejected in 1926 and which severed the relationship between Sean O'Casey and the Abbey Theatre. Although eventually performed in 1935, it never achieved the popularity of the trilogy - not only, Turnage believes, because of its unusual construction, but because of its departure from O'Casey's previous theme of Irish independence.
"It comes home strongly in the last act, where you have all these flags. And Bill Bryden, the director, says that's what the problem was in 1928. That they had left all that behind and suddenly there was this play about soldiers going off to fight for king and country, which is quite shocking really. And that didn't help the play." (Bryden, one of Britain's heavyweight theatre directors was an inspired choice. On the day Kennedy died - the moment, it's said, everyone of a certain vintage remembers - he was on stage acting in an amateur production of The Silver Tassie.)
As composer-in-residence at English National Opera, Turnage has been able to develop the opera through workshops and, he says, the benefits have been huge. "It was great. It was more like working on a musical in that sense, of honing the whole thing down. Working with singers right from an early stage." A major challenge, he says, was incorporating traditional tunes - such as The Silver Tassie itself - into what is largely an atonal work. "I had two fears: that it was going to be bad Britten War Requiem or bad Riverdance".
Judging from the first act I saw in dress rehearsal, The Silver Tassie's roots are as diverse as could be expected from a composer whose mentors are Britten, Miles Davis, Stravinsky and Herbie Hancock. Apart from Greek, his best-known work to date is probably Blood On The Floor, a concert suite for a jazz musicians, that deals with the drug culture that killed his brother in 1995.
Turnage still does not see himself as an opera composer. "People think I am because I wrote Greek. Because Berkoff is such a controversial figure, and because opera is much more high profile than concert work - it's what I am known for." Yet the Silver Tassie is only his third work for voices. Now 39, he began writing music when he was nine.
While continuing to deplore the elitism of opera, he admits that paradoxically it offers a route into contemporary music: "It's a terribly cynical thing to say, but people are put off by something that's abstract and in a concert hall. They don't have the same problem when they have other things to preoccupy them or they can be more convinced by it. So I think of it as a positive thing. If the audience don't like it, or are not too sure about the music, they've at least got the story and the costumes and the set."
Opens next Wednesday and runs on February 19th, 24th, 26th, 29th and March 3rd. To book phone 0044-171-6328300. It will be broadcast live on Radio 3, and BBC 2 will televise the opera on April 2nd.
