I was prompted to those thoughts by two new operas by British composers: Julian Anderson's Thebans, revisiting the world of Enescu's Oedipe, and another, as yet unperformed, opera by Oliver Rudland. Anderson's librettist Frank McGuinness reduces Sophocles's Theban trilogy to three acts, presenting a harrowing interpretation of the world's most famous dysfunctional family. He has crafted a meticulous and complex score. Lucid harmony, impeccable orchestration and wonderful singing make this into a memorable evening, the impression intensified by Pierre Audi's blunt and imagistic direction. Clusters of bird-like notes from the orchestra flutter about the characters on the stage, as they confront each other in emphatic dialogue. A dissonant chorus utters warnings and cries of compassion. The listener is left in no doubt that this is a significant event, dealing with deep and barely manageable emotions. But there is something missing. What is that thing? What are those people doing on stage singing their hearts out, if they have yet to discover a tune? Is it too old-fashioned to suggest that, every now and then in opera, there has to be a melody?

One thing that immediately strikes you in the music of Oliver Rudland is that melody is, for him, the sine qua non of the operatic stage. Rudland has asked me to introduce the first of three performances of his new opera at the Royal College of Music's Britten Theatre on July 24. The work is based on William Golding's novel Pincher Martin, which recounts the last thoughts, memories and hopes of a British naval rating, as his drowning body is dashed onto a rocky island in the Atlantic. I was intrigued by Rudland's idea of turning Golding's story into a one-act opera. For Pincher Martin is a work from my teenage years, part of the postwar attempt to make sense of England, to mourn its lost poetry and to find consolation, nonetheless, in the "inner" England that lies dormant in us all. How would a young person of today transcribe this devastating story into music?

Rudland has written two previous operas, including a touching setting of Oscar Wilde's fairytale, The Nightingale and the Rose. These appealing works, with their tuneful vocal line and tonal harmonies, led me to wonder what such a composer would make of Golding's grim fiction. If any scenario demands modernist dissonance and broken vocal lines, it is this one. In the event the score that Rudland put in my hands turned out to be surprisingly modern, with a raw orchestral seascape against which the tonal melodies sound like the breaths snatched by Martin as he fights his losing battle with the waves.

The set makes use of a cinematic backdrop. The foreground revolves quickly from jagged rock to remembered drawing room, while characters from the past appear and disappear in rapid succession. The music interweaves recollection and perception, past and present, remembered trauma and present fear. The ghosts are brought before us by music that is as haunting to the listener as to the drowning sailor on the stage. The heaving ocean in the pit constantly shatters the past, and the shards of memory pierce the dying sailor again and again until there is nothing positive left of him — only anger, regret and fear.

Oliver Rudland's music has melody, rhythm and harmony, and passages of considerable lyric power. Perhaps that explains why it has fallen through the net of official subsidies. The Arts Council, being run by bureaucrats, is obliged to be at the "cutting edge", supporting what is "challenging", "vibrant" and preferably "subversive", in order to show that the bureaucrats are entirely impartial, and therefore not misled into supporting something merely because they like it. On the contrary, it is because they don't like it that a new work will earn their support: that is what the word "challenging" really means. Subsidy or no subsidy, so convinced is Rudland that the path he has chosen is the right one that he has decided to make this opera happen, whatever the cost. He has chosen poverty with opera, against comfort without it. Like others who have succumbed to the operatic urge, he sees opera as a need, not a choice. It may be the most expensive noise known to man, but it is a noise that has to happen.