It's contemporary, it's controversial and it has been written especially for TV. But can an opera, based on the death of Princess Diana succeed on the small screen? Charlotte Higgins finds out.
It is a coolish early-summer evening, and a bleary grey dusk is gradually darkening into night. A high wall in an elegant London park is covered in drawings, photographs cut out of magazines and elaborately crafted votives. Beneath them lie heaps of cellophane-wrapped flowers. The tributes are dedicated to Princess Diana. They do not, however, bear close inspection - one reads: "We are really sad that you died, but hey, shit happens." For this is not Kensington Gardens, September 1997, but Charlton Park in south-east London, 2002. The cards and pictures have been assembled in the offices of a TV production company, and this is a location for When She Died, a television opera by Jonathan Dove about reactions to Diana's death.
Tonight, the production team is shooting the opera's finale. The characters - the obsessive Ryan, the damaged Annie and her family, and a working-class couple named Doris and Dennis - have already been seen dealing, in their different ways, with the news of the fatal Paris car crash. They are all now gathered at Kensington Gardens the night before the funeral; their fates become intertwined and there is a melodramatic denouement.
Throughout, the different strands of the piece have been pulled together by the Homeless Man, played by bass Willard White, who disinterestedly passes comment on events. For the past half-hour or so (though it seems like for ever, since everyone around, including visiting journalists, has been roped in as extras). White has been patiently singing the following lines: "They have brought flowers and cards and tokens . . . tokens of love and regret . . . for someone they never knew . . . for someone they never met." The piece may surprise those who associate opera with fat divas in crinolines. This work kicks off with shots of the characters sitting in front of their TVs; we also see them making sandwiches and hear them referring to park-and-ride and trips to Sainsbury's supermarket. "I told you it didn't sound right under the bonnet," sings Dennis, as his Maestro breaks down on the way to London.
What really makes this opera eye-catching, though, is its choice of subject. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the work has already proved controversial. Earlier in the year, a headline in the London-based Daily Mail newspaper barked: "Sick opera to mark five years since Diana's death." (The paper was referring to an episode in the piece where Ryan, who is obsessed with the princess, employs a prostitute to dress up as her, then strips her and performs a bizarre ritual over her naked body.)
"It would be sad if people got the impression it was a sensational piece and therefore didn't watch it," says Dove. "Inevitably the gutter press will think they are getting some kind of pro or anti line about Diana, and it will be frustrating for them that it's not really about her." Why did he choose the subject, if not to be sensational? "Director Rupert Edwards and I were both very excited by the possibility of opera being about something with contemporary relevance," says Dove. "We started discussing ideas from public life, government - things that I thought weren't very inspiring operatically. My recollection is that Rupert said, 'Of course, one could never do anything like the death of Princess Diana.' And in that moment I could suddenly see that you could write an opera that began with the death and ended with the funeral.
"That time was an incredibly operatic, expressive moment in British history. I felt that an opera might be able to create a better portrait of it than other media. There were a lot of feelings around when she died, but not necessarily ones that could be articulated. Instead, they were shown in ways that were dramatic and visible and tangible - it was theatrical. I wasn't so interested in Princess Diana herself as much as in ordinary people, many of whom had a huge sense of connection with someone they had never met."
In fact, though it is easy to think of most operas as being about people and events far away and long ago, Dove and his librettist, the poet David Harsent, are following a well-worn path of music theatre that grapples with contemporary events or issues. John Adams's Nixon in China, which premièred in 1987, is an account of the former American president's visit to the People's Republic. The same composer's Death of Klinghoffer tells the story of the killing of a Jewish cruise liner passenger by Palestinians following a hijacking. Any controversy that When She Died may spark when it is screened later this month will surely pale into insignificance compared with that surrounding Klinghoffer; after September 11th a New York Times critic accused Adams of being "anti-American, anti-semitic and anti-bourgeois".
Further back in the past, Verdi's A Masked Ball told of the assassination of the Swedish King Gustavus III, which had occurred within living memory; the story was unacceptable to the local censors. There are numerous examples of operas - from The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute to Nabucco - that have touched on politically explosive areas.
But can you really make opera work on TV? People have certainly been trying, for as long as television has been around.
It is undeniable that putting opera on TV is hard. Opera on stage has a natural power through being live, through the fact that it is performed, unmediated, in the same room as its audience. Opera on TV can feel as though it has had all the lifeblood leeched from it. But is this partly because composers and librettists are unwilling or unable to exploit the medium to the full?
According to Jan Younghusband, who commissioned When She Died for Channel 4: "So much of opera is the magic of the theatre - and I don't think you can ever capture that on television. TV has to create a different sort of magic. I asked Dove to write an opera that couldn't be done on stage." Part of the way that is achieved is through a careful intertwining of form and content: in When She Died, the characters' relationships with Diana have been developed through their seeing her on TV, and the work is infused with archive footage.
For the singers, filming a TV opera presents its own particular set of challenges. Willard White says: "It's hard. When I am singing on stage everything is all right - it has to be. But when you are filming, if you step over the mark just slightly, everything has to be redone." There is no miming in When She Died; the performers sing to a backing track of the previously recorded instrumental ensemble - with the aid of a live conductor. The voices and instrumental music must be precisely synchronised, which is tricky. But it's all worthwhile as far as Willis is concerned. "Every other art form concerns itself with stuff that's directly related to people's lives. There's very little of that in opera - so it's thrilling to do something that's about now."
- Guardian News Service
When She Died is on Channel 4 on Sunday August 25th at 9 p.m.