One more thought: isn't it also high time someone staged his earlier opera The Silver Tassie again?
The premiere of Anna Nicole by Mark-Anthony
Turnage, in 2011, was unlike any other the Royal Opera House has experienced. The
foyer was plastered with images of the soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek as Anna
Nicole Smith, complete with supersized fake breasts; and on the stage’s red
velvet curtains the initials for the Queen, ER II, were replaced with “AnR”. This
startling transformation of empty celebrity into high art is back to open the
Royal Opera House’s new season on 11 September, with a special performance for
an audience of students.
Turnage himself is all for this latter idea. “I think it’s fantastic,” he says. “I feel it’s part of a genuine effort by Covent Garden to get a wider audience in – they really want to make a difference.” Still, he has no idea how the work will go over with this youthful crowd: “I hope they’ll see it as a comic piece with a tragic end. But it’s quite likely that none of them, mostly aged between 18 and 26, will have heard of Anna Nicole Smith,” he remarks.
The eponymous heroine, to remind you, built
a career as model and TV presenter after having her breasts surgically enhanced
to vast proportions. She married an octogenarian billionaire, but was excluded
from his will, lost her son to drugs and died of an overdose aged 39 in 2007. The
court cases around her have rumbled on into recent weeks.
Still, it is the archetypal “fallen woman”
resonances of her tale that well suit the genre of opera. “I think you can get too
obsessed with the idea that it’s a story that relates to today,” says Turnage.
“We were after a story that’s universal. Relevance – so what? If it dates, it
dates. This time I won’t read the reviews.”
Anna Nicole was a hit with some for
Turnage’s gritty, jazzy, sometimes heartbreakingly beautiful score and its
snarky libretto by Richard Thomas (of Jerry Springer: The Opera). Others,
considering the subject too trashy for an opera house, couldn’t abide it. For
its composer, creating it was both agony and ecstasy.
“I found it very hard to write,” he says. The
difficulty was the comedy: “It’s so hard to make people laugh!” He says he
relied strongly on Thomas’s skill and experience with that side of it, adding,
“All the miserable, angsty, lyrical stuff – that’s much easier for me.”
Controversy still surrounds the work:
several opera houses in the US have demurred from staging it because of its bad
language. But at 54 Turnage is no stranger to controversy. He shot to fame in
his late twenties when his first opera, Greek, established him as the “bad boy”
of British new music. While modernism and serialism were still excessively
dominant forces, he drew vital influences from popular idioms, which was
considered highly rebellious; and much was made in the press of his Essex
background and his passion for football. “I’d played it up,” he admits, “and it
hasn’t done me any harm.”
More fuss emerged in 2010 when his
orchestral work for the Proms, Hammered Out, proved to have rather a lot in
common with Beyoncé’s "Single Ladies". The imitation was a sincere form of
flattery, plus a musical gift for his son, who liked the song; but eventually, Turnage
says, “I paid 50 per cent to Beyoncé. I’d handled it really badly,” he
reflects. “I should have come clean about it from the start.” His biggest
regret, though, seems to be that he did not get to meet the R&B star.
His penchant for popular idioms may not
have endeared Turnage to musical establishment organisations that give annual
awards; incredibly, his only prizes are for his opera The Silver Tassie, which
scooped an Olivier Award and a South Bank Award in 2000. Nevertheless, he has a
strong following among both public and musicians, constantly garnering an
impressive string of international commissions at the highest level, with
orchestras including the New York Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic. The
premiere takes place in Flanders, in October, of Passchendaele, a work commemorating
World War I; further highlights ahead include another opera for Covent Garden, planned
for 2020.
“People say I’m prolific,” Turnage remarks.
“Well, I’ve got a lot of kids, so I’ve got to write a lot of music. I’m not
writing to be indulgent, I’m writing to provide for my family.” He has four
children aged between 18 and three, from two ex-marriages. Composers, he
acknowledges, can be difficult to live with: “You can become so focused on work
that you can be a pain in the arse. I think I’ve learned how to switch off.” Today
he lives alone in a compact north London flat where his desk companions are
busts of Beethoven and Brahms and, on his computer, an exceptionally scary
photograph of Stravinsky.
“People do find composing hard and they do
struggle,” he says. “But that struggle, the pain of it, is also very attractive
to me, very engaging. If we’re not totally bound up in this strange world we’re
in in composition, then something’s wrong. It’s got to be obsessive.”
Anna
Nicole, Royal Opera House, London, from 11 September. Box office: 020 7304 4000
