The first thing I discovered was how easy it is to make bar follow bar, theme follow theme and chord follow chord, when all are hung out on the line of dialogue. The Gesamtkunstwerk readily declines to its opposite: music that has only a borrowed order, and dialogue that is too weak to stand alone. I thought constantly of the conclusion to the second Act of Figaro, in which sustained symphonic writing creates a tension that is wholly musical, wholly dramatic and also wholly integrated with da Ponte's brilliant text. That remains my paradigm: a dramatic idea expounded through a tonal argument.

By contrast, the music of The Minister is held together by no inner logic, but merely by the dramatic imperative of "Next!". Wrestling with this problem, trying to re-imagine the music as the engine of the drama rather than the trailer that it pulled, I learned more about music than at any time in my life before. I recalled Berg's habit, in both Wozzeck and Lulu, of drawing attention to the musical forms explored by his orchestra-sonata form, theme and variations, fugue, gavotte, passacaglia, and so on, all neatly and almost academically explained in the score, while the raging melodrama on the stage drags the music into excesses that would be utterly senseless in a purely instrumental work. Berg is cheating his way to musical form, by borrowing the shape of a drama. And I guess that, in my infinitely less accomplished way, I was doing the same.

Reflecting on this, however, I came to see more clearly why opera is and has always been the high point of the modern composer's art. To compose music in which drama and music move towards climax and closure not just simultaneously but in a single movement, so that the drama becomes the music and the music becomes the drama — this is to endow life with a form that it cannot otherwise reach to. It is to prefigure what we humans might be, were we rescued from time and remade in eternity. Writing The Minister was therapeutic, as no doubt Thebans has been for Anderson and Pincher Martin for Rudland. And here, perhaps, lies the explanation of the operatic urge — the real cause why Beethoven tried not once but three or four times to extract from himself the story of Leonore. For his opera is both an objective drama and the transfiguration of his inner life. He yearned for a love so strong, bold and otherworldly as to change woman to man and man to woman. By finding the objective correlative for this hermaphroditic fantasy he was released from its grip. And in healing himself he conferred on the world a tribute to freedom and joy that will remain in the repertoire as long as operas are staged.

Just such a therapy occupied Debussy in Pelléas and Britten in Peter Grimes, the one wrestling with a desire that disdains the messy world of real commitments, the other gripped by malign temptations from which we all must turn. Those great artists endowed these difficult emotions with outward form, inventing the imaginary world that resolves them. They gave a clear outside view on inner conflicts, which they transcended through the notes. In Pincher Martin Oliver Rudland enters equally dark regions of the psyche, regions of terror and guilt. Darkness needs light, terror needs comfort and guilt needs redemption — all of which are conferred by music when it moves by necessity towards that ineffable resolving chord. Rudland has still to send me the final part of his score: but I have a premonition of what that final chord will be.

---

The premiere production of Oliver Rudland's opera "Pincher Martin", based on the novel by William Golding, will take place at the Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music, London, from Thursday 24 to Saturday 26 July, with an introductory pre-performance talk on the first night by Roger Scruton.