The titles of Jonathan Dove’s musical works — Flight, Tobias and the Angel, Palace in the Sky, The Little Green Swallow, Man on the Moon — might lead one to consider his winged surname a highly appropriate one. However, while the composer undoubtedly possesses a soaring imagination, it is allied to a refreshingly pragmatic, earthbound streak, and he is also the author of the more prosaically titled Pig, Greed and An Old Way to Pay New Debts.
‘I don’t work to an inner manifesto but I suppose that, in my operatic writing, I am always exploring something about where the boundaries of opera are, opera and theatre. I’m trying to reclaim the art form for a broader audience.’
He is currently reclaiming on all sides. With writer Alasdair Middleton he has created this year’s Young Vic Christmas show, The Enchanted Pig; his television opera about Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, will be broadcast by Channel 4 in late December; and a new opera, Pinocchio, has been commissioned for performance by Opera North at the end of 2007. In addition, the wondrously renovated Young Vic theatre reopened with a revival of Dove’s community opera Tobias and the Angel, which was an overwhelming success, adored by audiences and participants alike.
Was his first musical instinct a theatrical one? Has he always liked the idea of what words and music can do together?
‘Thinking back there was always music and there was always theatre, but they were separate things. I’d sit at the piano for hours every day just making up music, and I made lots of model theatres, of increasingly elaborate mechanical contrivance. The last one used up nearly all of my Meccano set; it had ultra-violet light, a hydraulic bridge and a revolving stage.
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