A new opera about Margaret Thatcher
I have good reason to remember the May morning in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher won her first general election. That day I was being interviewed for a job on a scholarly periodical at a famous publishing house (I didn’t get it, so I drifted into the grubby world of daily journalism instead). I found the interview eye-opening. The panel – senior academics in the cultural field – spent most of the time wailing that, in their eyes, the election result signalled ‘the end of civilisation’. It’s fair to say that, in the following 11 years, the cultural and academic world’s despair at the arrival of Thatcherism hardened into outright loathing.
So, I will be intrigued to see how the divisive figure of Mrs T has been turned into the leading character in an opera – an artform her government did very little to support. But I will also be interested to discover how this new piece, by the composer Joseph Phibbs and historian Dominic Sandbrook, fits into what is now almost a genre in its own right: operas focused on modern political figures. Over the past 30 years I’ve seen so many that I feel I could compile a history of the 20th century using only arias.
Opera as a medium to express political views
Of course, composers in earlier centuries also used opera to express a political view. Think of Monteverdi dissecting Machiavellian scheming in The Coronation of Poppea, Mussorgsky chronicling the disintegration of a murderous tyrant in Boris Godunov or Verdi hymning the liberation of enslaved people in Nabucco. But in most of those cases the composers decided, doubtless for reasons of self-preservation, to use figures from the distant past to make topical points. Only in the late 20th century, and then only in benign Western democracies, did they feel safe enough to create ‘warts and all’ operatic portrayals of contemporary political figures.
Minimalist masterpieces: Richard Nixon and Mahatma Gandhi
How did that start? Well, John Adams may not have been the first, but he certainly hit on a much-copied template when he composed Nixon in China to a libretto by Alice Goodman. The piece was premiered only 15 years after President Nixon’s historic 1972 journey to meet Chairman Mao, and it managed to convey both the mythic significance piled onto that meeting and its essential hollowness as well. Nixon and Mao sing in meaningless cliches; the meeting changes nothing. Adams wrote other ‘docu-operas’ after that, but none featured world leaders.
However, his fellow minimalist pioneer, Philip Glass, did portray a powerful world leader – none other than Mahatma Gandhi – in his epic 1980 opera Satyagraha. Three and a half hours long, sung entirely in Sanskrit (and without surtitles in English National Opera’s celebrated production), it’s not for everyone. But there’s something hypnotic about its dreamlike meditation on Gandhi’s early civil rights struggles in South Africa.
Opera and political giants: Steve Biko and Muammar Gaddafi
That country was also the location for Priti Paintal’s 1992 opera about Steve Biko, the charismatic anti-apartheid campaigner beaten to death by state security officers in 1977. It was the first work commissioned by the Royal Opera House from either a woman composer or an Asian-born one. Perhaps it should be revived next year to mark the 50th anniversary of Biko’s death.
It was certainly more profound than another political opera that hit London a few decades ago. Commissioned and premiered by English National Opera, Gaddafi: A Living Myth used hip-hop music and several hundred thousand pounds of taxpayers’ money to paint an unusually jolly portrait of Libya under the Colonel, and to convey what the opera’s creators (the electronica group Asian Dub Foundation) called ‘the uniqueness of his attempt to build a utopia’. Oddly, ENO presented this as a serious critique of North African politics. Less surprisingly, it has never been revived.
Melania Trump and Greta Thunberg
More recently London audiences have seen operas featuring Melania Trump (she rebels in the final scene of Melinda Hughes’s satire and says exactly what she thinks about her husband), Greta Thunberg (loosely disguised as an eco-warrior schoolgirl in Jonathan Dove’s Uprising) and Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist politicians in Conor Mitchell’s satirical opera Abomination.
So, what explains this proliferation of politicians in operas? Perhaps a clue lies in a sentence from one of the sci-fi author Frank Herbert’s Dune novels. ‘All governments suffer a recurring problem,’ he wrote. ‘Power attracts pathological personalities.’ But pathological personalities are exactly what operas need! And it’s even better if they are household names. The only rule for composers looking for a juicy subject is: make sure you pick a politician who’s safely dead. Or get yourself a good lawyer.
