Mark-Anthony Turnage talks in syncopations. Like much of his vivid, rhythmically driven music, there are beats missing from his sentences. He interrupts himself more often than any interviewer could and apologises repeatedly – his enthusiasm spiked with wariness. Listening to him is like trying to hang on to the multiple melodic lines in a passage of intricate counterpoint.
We are backstage at the Royal Opera House in London. Sporting one of his trademark hats with a hefty spiral-bound score within arm’s reach, Turnage sits alongside his current collaborator, Lee Hall – award-winning playwright, lyricist and author of screenplays including Billy Elliot and Rocketman – in a small, nondescript office. It’s the first time they’ve worked together but their rapport is obvious. Hall sits back calmly while Turnage launches into rapid-fire musings on critical feedback, orchestral balance and choral training, before I’ve even switched on my recorder. When invited to speak, Hall is incisive, by turns candid and diplomatic. Both wear cardigans and gratefully accept cups of tea.
But the cosiness ends there. Hall and Turnage have come straight from a rehearsal for their new opera, Festen, which will premiere at Covent Garden next month with a cast led by tenor Allan Clayton and bass-baritone Gerald Finley. It is Turnage’s second work for ROH’s main stage, after Anna Nicole – about the reality TV star Anna Nicole Smith – in 2011. The new opera is based on the 1998 Danish film Festen (meaning The Celebration), directed by Thomas Vinterberg, about the 60th birthday party of a wealthy businessman at which a series of appalling revelations come to light.
The Royal Opera describes Festen as a “cult film” – it was the first product of Vinterberg and Lars von Trier’s Dogme 95 movement, but I confess I had first watched it a few days earlier, having been in secondary school when it came out. “I really hope you weren’t watching Festen at that age!” Turnage cackles. He has been encouraging friends to watch the film, with limited success. “Some of them say, ‘I’m building up to watching,’ or ‘I don’t know when I’m going to be in the right mood,’ and that’s sort of daft in a way. But, you know, I’ve got Francis Bacon pictures in my house, so maybe I live with that sort of thing.”
In the case of Festen “that sort of thing” means child abuse, racism and self-harm. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Royal Opera’s booking page for the new opera is awash with trigger warnings and even includes a full synopsis. So how did they end up picking this as an operatic subject?
Turnage loved the film when he first saw it. “I mean I don’t know if ‘love’, is quite the word,” he adds anxiously. “I found it amazing.” But he didn’t think of it as a possible subject for an opera until later, after seeing a stage version of Vinterberg’s 2012 film The Hunt – “another child abuse film” – that sent him back to Festen and “I had a sort of lightbulb moment”.
Hall explains that “if you wanted a perfect screenplay structure to teach from, Festen is it.” He hadn’t considered its operatic potential before Turnage proposed it, “but immediately I could see how it would work. It falls into three acts and does all of the classical things that you really need – there’s that bone structure for something as complex as an opera.”
They’re both adamant that the film isn’t just grim. “It’s in a more European tradition of the grotesque than simply, you know, dour,” explains Hall. “Although it has all this very shocking subject matter, it’s really a very dark comedy.” He is keen to stress that comes through in the opera. “I think what might surprise people is that it’s quite a fun show,” he says. They giggle nervously. “The last thing we wanted to do was to have a show which is this serious – about these really serious issues – that was just a bitter pill.”
But do they also expect people to be shocked? Turnage – erstwhile enfant terrible of British contemporary music, who grins as he says “I’m an expert on setting swearing” – claims not. “None of this wouldn’t be on Netflix,” he insists. “And that, for me, is the interesting thing – for some reason, with an opera, it seems to hit a nerve.” As Hall points out, “the subject matter of nearly every opera is pretty serious”. Turnage agrees energetically. “If there’s a trigger warning because one of their opera’s characters has killed themselves,” he suggests, “there must be for Tosca, then – there must be for loads of other operas!” But then his caution returns. “I think I forget that I’m liberal, left wing, you know … you forget there are people who are offended.”
The composer confides he was recently told off by his publisher – “in a nice way”, after he was “quite rude about contemporary music” as the castaway on Desert Island Discs. But he isn’t entirely chastened. “A lot of us are not saying stuff because you can’t,” he says, suddenly direct. Hall is less guarded in general. “This whole worry about offence or triggering people is misplaced. I think that’s why you go to the opera: to enjoy a serious aesthetic look at difficult things. The worry for me is that we patronise an audience by being too scared of that. Because it’s grownups who go to the opera.”
It’s not only audiences who can object to particular subject matter, of course. I mention that there have been rumours of difficulties in the rehearsal room over certain lines in the libretto. Turnage emits a short, mirthless laugh. Hall shifts into diplomatic mode. “Opera is a massive collective endeavour. That’s why workshops are really useful to start to understand the material, because the great thing about a rehearsal room is that you get 20 perspectives. But then suddenly in opera you get 80 different perspectives! I’ve found it very interesting and very creative to hear how other people approach this material.”
Turnage takes over, riffing on the challenges of text-setting before returning to the point. “You have to build up trust,” he concludes. And he loves the Royal Opera’s orchestra, which he’s worked with before. “With choruses, you know, it’s like with an orchestra. It’s scary because you’re working with 80 musicians. You know that statistic, where 30% of people like you, 30% are indifferent, 30% don’t like you?” As a composer, he reckons, it’s more about some musicians being resistant to trying new things than them actively not liking you. But at least, he observes: “I don’t write difficult difficult music …”
Difficult or not, it will be a surprise to some in the classical music world that Turnage has written another opera at all. A spat on social media after the premiere of his children’s opera Coraline in 2018 culminated in the composer announcing that it would be his last operatic work. That “wasn’t such a happy collaboration”, he sighs. “That’s probably why I didn’t want to write any more, because I wasn’t so happy with how that turned out.”
But he also notes that he’s always asked about his next opera straight after finishing one – “And I don’t want to talk about writing another opera because it’s exhausting! So I was the equivalent of, like, Daniel Craig in James Bond, because he always said, ‘I’ll never do another Bond film.’” There’s a pause. “I know it’s a stupid analogy.”
This time, though, Turnage has been enjoying himself. Hall, too. “I just love the opera. It’s got everything that theatre has and it’s got everything that music can give you!” They agree that creating full-scale opera is a huge, complex challenge. Hall admits: “I’m glad I came to this quite late, because I had a lot of craft, which you really do need.”
Turnage has worked with a different librettist on each of his previous operas. Is it a case of finding the right person for each project, I wonder? “A bit of that,” he says carefully. “Although I definitely want to work with Lee again – and that’s the first time that’s happened.” What’s different about this collaboration? “I’ve had experiences where I’ve had to really coach librettists,” Turnage explains, “because they didn’t know any operas. I didn’t have to do that with Lee. I hadn’t explained things. It was like, immediately, I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, I can set that.’”
Turnage’s next opera, an adaptation of The Railway Children with a libretto by Rachael Hewer, has already been announced for Glyndebourne’s autumn season. But beyond that? “We’re talking a lot,” says Turnage. “I’m always looking, all the time. I’m still obsessed with writing opera.” And they’re not put off by the dismal state of opera funding in the UK? “I’m very aware of it, of course, and I’m very angry about it,” the composer says emphatically. “So maybe there won’t be another [opera]. Not for not wanting to do it, but because it’s getting harder because of funding. But you just have to get on with it and hope that somebody puts it on.”
• Festen is at the Royal Opera House, London, 11-27 February
