Next week, after the première of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera Festen, the cast and conductor will take their bow. All being well, there’ll be applause; and then a brief lull as the creative team takes the stage. There’s often a ripple of curiosity in the audience at this point, because it’s rare that we get to see just how many people it really takes to make an opera. Standing near the composer will be Lee Hall, the writer of Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters, and now part of the most maligned – and indispensable – profession in all of music. He’s the librettist.
In short, Hall wrote the words, and in the world of opera there’s no more thankless task. ‘There’s this snobbery about it, an English snobbery, I suppose,’ he says. ‘There is this divide that I find – the theatre world is so separate from the music world in general. I go to concerts all the time and rarely see anybody from my world at them. It’s very odd.’
Hall’s feat (assuming he brings it off) is to square a near-impossible circle. Festen is adapted from Thomas Vinterberg’s cult 1998 movie, a product of the ultra-naturalistic Dogme 95 movement in which special effects, film scores and any kind of theatricality are all forbidden. Vinterberg said that his aim was ‘to counter the mediocrity and the conventional in the most conservative of our time’s artforms – namely filmmaking’. Unkind critics – and librettists are never short of those – might suggest that by turning Festen into an opera, Hall is pushing in the opposite direction.
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