New operas can escape that fate, since the composer is around to prevent it. In Rudland's Pincher Martin music, words, sets, gestures and lighting are integral parts of a unified dramatic conception, and Rudland is determined that the opera should be realised exactly as he conceived it. Without an official subsidy and all the paraphernalia that tends to come with it, a composer can take full control of the performance, and not just of the score. Equally it is when subsidies are not forthcoming that we see how unnecessary they are. Singing automatically places the actors in an imaginary world, and properly crafted melodic lines will shape the passions, the relations and the gestures according to the inner logic of the drama. The attempt to embellish the action with machinery, special effects and arcane symbols is as likely to diminish as to enhance its persuasive power. Hence costumes, make-up, lighting and a few suggestive props may be sufficient to transport the audience into the heart of the drama. The contribution of the producer is then a kind of visual noise, as expensive as the noise that troubled Molière.

Many people have an opera buried within them: so at least I believe. For the inner life is essentially operatic. It sings to itself in many voices, and we strive in our dreams and meditations to bring those voices into line, to turn discord to concord, and conflict to resolution. Precisely because the characters in opera sing their passions, we sense that these passions are really cosmic forces, whose scope is far greater than the mere individuals who represent them. Through opera our inner life is summoned from hidden regions and resolved before us on the stage.

So it was in my own first attempt — a one-act meditation on the familiar theme of power versus love, set in Sixties Britain, and in the mind and memory of a lonely politician, who is The Minister of the opera's title. This story was a projection of the inner life, my own inner life, in which guilt and trauma made their discordant claims on me, and were yet to find the objective form that would resolve them. The inner life can be given objective form by magic, and music — which makes no distinction between the natural and the supernatural — is at home with magic. It passes with ease across the barrier between present and past, the actual and the possible. What might have been is always present in the present tense of music.

Hence we have a long tradition of magic opera — from the god-haunted dramas of Monteverdi, Cavalli and the French court composers, through Semele, The Magic Flute, Der Freischütz, The Flying Dutchman, Parsifal and Die Frau ohne Schatten, down to The Turn of the Screw and Curlew River. In all those works the drama, guided by the music, moves effortlessly between the material and the spiritual worlds, and the audience sees its own inmost feelings released from the darkness and parading on the stage.

I conceived The Minister as a magic opera in this tradition, just as Rudland did in his setting of Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale and the Rose. In a gesture of supreme impertinence, I decided to follow the great and inimitable example set by Britten in Curlew River, and to borrow from the Noh theatre of Japan. The opera was to be a drama with masks, which fall away to reveal moral truth beneath the ruin of social pretence. I devised a few leitmotifs, allotted them to situations, moods and characters, and to my amazement within a few months I had a complete piano score.