Back on track: How lockdown led to a new operatic version of The Railway Children | Opera

I You have a history with Glyndebourne. In 1984, when I was a naive 24-year-old, I copied music to make ends meet. My great friend and mentor Oliver Knussen had me work on his opera Where the Wild Things Are before the premiere of the Glyndebourne Touring Opera.

I moved to Lewes and often stayed up all night, handwriting orchestral parts with my colleagues. I learned a lot during those very stressful days. I have attended many performances at Glyndebourne since then, and for 20 years I have been in talks with the artistic team about writing a new opera, but have never found a suitable subject. A decade later, my partner Rachel Hewer started working there as assistant director, and I regularly went to stay during the summer and autumn, often at Gus Christie’s house (the magnificent Glyndebourne House, which had previously belonged to festival founders John Christie and Audrey Mildmay). I started thinking it would be fun to write an opera for all the new friends I met there. Then Covid hit. Rachel and I, like everyone else, needed to do something constructive with all those extra hours on our hands. We made a plan: write an opera.

I know lockdown has been hard for most people, but as an author I’m used to isolation. I always write at home, except for short periods of working with musicians and singers in concert halls and opera houses. The thought of months and months when I can’t do anything else but compose makes me happy. However, I sometimes feel we are in danger of forgetting what those early days of the first coronavirus lockdown were like. I remember it very clearly – as we watched the daily briefings, those numbers were rising dramatically almost every hour. We were really afraid for our future. Will life ever go back to how it was before? Will theaters reopen, and will we hear orchestras in person again? It seemed like we were living a precarious life, although when I look back I realize we were in a very lucky position.

Rachel and I had to juggle homeschooling my children. Rachel did most of that. They spent three days with us, then three days with their mother. On our three days off, we worked hard on The Railway Children. We chose it partly because it’s a beloved book by E Nesbit and an iconic film that everyone loves, especially my generation, but it’s also out of copyright – so we didn’t need permission.

As a book, The Railway Children is somewhat episodic, so Rachel’s first task was to distill it, otherwise we would have had a six-hour Wagnerian opera. We moved forward in secret. Rachel was upstairs writing a scene and would deliver it to my office downstairs. I’ll keep it up (I occasionally ask for a small rewrite, usually condensed or simplified). Then you write the next and so on. It took us just over four months. Normally it would take up to two years to write a complete opera, but the pandemic helped us with that. Then we put it on the shelf and thought: “Well, that was a nice distraction.” Rachel went on to direct Ravel’s L’enfant et les Sortilèges (for which she won the South Bank Sky Arts Award), and began working with Lee Hall in Festen for the Royal Ballet and Opera. We’ve almost forgotten about it.

Later, we took another look at it and decided it would be nice to hear. We organized a workshop with some of our amazing singer friends. They were sworn to secrecy. Even my publisher didn’t know. These singers did such a wonderful job that they convinced us that opera might have a life. It needed a lot of work and we decided that the Edwardian setting required updating. You never know why Dad went to prison, so we filled out his backstory, added a spy element and moved it into the 1980s, making Mom a much stronger character.

If we are really honest, we have to admit that we only had the Glyndebourne Theater in mind for this purpose. Once we returned to this piece about a year later, things began to open up again, and it seemed that there would be a world to return to that might have space and room for a new opera.

We decided to bite the bullet and sent it to the opera company’s artistic director, Stephen Langridge. We got a proper copy of everything printed out and bound, and Rachel included a fun-sized Wispa strip in the packaging as a hint to keep it under wraps. He wasn’t in a position to commit to doing the project at that stage, so we had to sit down and let him see if he was interested, and then whether there was a place for the piece at Glyndebourne. We thought our chances were slim, and were astonished when Stephen came back to say that Glyndebourne would organize it. It was my idea that he should direct it himself.

Even after seeing Nikki Shaw’s stunning stage designs in model form, I still couldn’t believe it was happening. Then news of the production appeared on the website, people started buying tickets, and here we are, in the middle of rehearsals, about to see the action on stage for the first time. I know it’s here in front of me, and I’m well aware of the hard work and determination that went into making this a reality, but there’s still a big part of me that looks back at how and when it was created, how different the world was back then, and how far we’ve come since then, and at the same time how much we’ve left behind.