RUFUS WAINWRIGHT Prima Donna, The Story of an Opera
Decca 074 3397
The making of Rufus Wainwright’s debut opera Prima Donna would make a suitable subject for an opera in itself. Depicting “a day in the life of an ageing opera singer”, it was famously (perhaps even infamously) commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera but subsequently rejected when its author insisted on it being sung in French and staged earlier than the 2014 slot available in New York.
Disappointingly, George Scott’s otherwise fascinating documentary is forgetfully discrete about the fact (let alone the details) of the schism – by all accounts, mutually harmonious – between Wainwright and the Met besides the composer’s justification for his choice of language: “Opera in English doesn’t sound good… it doesn’t work on the ear”.
But this 84-minute profile delivers in other ways, not least with it’s behind-the-scenes diary of the work’s eventual premiere at the Manchester International Festival in the UK in a co-production with Opera North in 2009 (its North American premiere took place in Toronto in June) and in offering a more revealing portrait of the clearly guarded Wainwright than one might have expected.
A scion, illustrious in his own idiosyncratic way, of contemporary folk music demi-gods Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle – who describes him in footage shot before her death in January this year, as “always eccentric, and allowed to be” – Rufus was smitten by opera early on. (One of the many home movies to be found here features him in early adolescence playing Scarpia in a home-movie remake of Tosca.)
He clearly knows and loves opera – certainly, his songs have something innately operatic about many of them and his latest pop album is a song cycle in all but name about Wedekind and Berg’s Lulu. There’s a most touching moment here with Wainwright and his mother raptly listening to Gigli singing ‘Puisqu’on ne peut fléchir’ from Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys.
Wainwright has instinct enough about the brute process of staging an opera, too. In one aside to camera, late in the rehearsal process as opening night nears, he confides: “There’s a battle going on for the soul of the piece”, a comment illuminated by an earlier observation that: “You have to stand your ground – like a tiger – as the composer”.
The opera was inspired by – “but is not specifically about” – Maria Callas describing what it means to be a Prima Donna in her 1968 interview with Lord Harewood (available on an EMI Classic Archive DVD), when, apparently, “the story fell out of the Heavens and onto my lap, and the entire arc of the evening presented itself to me”.
The eponymous central character owes as much to Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond as to Callas, however, and not a little, perhaps, to Wainwright’s own intoxicatingly early brush with fame. “Booze, drugs, sex or the stage – I did whatever it took to get it!”
In interview situations, Wainwright is articulate, aware of and nothing less than serious about the commitment opera demands. In footage of him at work (substantially so in the 40-odd minutes of bonus scenes), he looks and sounds every inch the composer, every ounce a theatre animal.
Contributions from the production’s director Daniel Kramer, soprano Janis Kelly (who sings the demanding title role), co-librettist Bernadette Giraudeau, Wainwright’s parents, sister Martha, and partner, the German-born arts administrator Jörn Weisbrodt, are all level-headed and direct. American soprano Renée Fleming – cool and considered but clearly a fan – pops up regularly, too.
And there’s certainly enough of the music here to catch the ear and make one eager to hear more. Might it be too much to hope for the complete production on DVD from Decca in the near future?
