Fighting talk | 23 November 2017

There’s a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie in which Tippi Hedren is emptying a safe while a cleaning lady silently drags her mop towards her. Can Hedren, playing the disturbed Marnie, slip down the stairs before the woman turns her head?

I felt a twinge of the same panic last week interviewing the composer Nico Muhly, whose opera Marnie — based more closely on Winston Graham’s novel than on Hitchcock’s film — was given its world première by English National Opera last Saturday. Would I make it out of the room without asking the Wrong Question?

Muhly, who made his name as the cherubic, prodigiously gifted but prickly protégé of Philip Glass, is scary to interview. This is well known in New York. Even those critics who don’t like his music admire the cheeky brutality of his wit. They just don’t want to be his targets.

His first opera, Two Boys, about internet predators, was written in his twenties and performed at ENO and then the Met.