Lee Langley

Sounding a different note

Midsummer Nights, edited by Jeanette Winterson

What is inspiration and how does it work? Music and literature have a long record of mutual nourishment: Beethoven inspired Tolstoy who inspired Janacek, and each Kreutzer Sonata was different; miraculously rich and strange.

Jeanette Winterson, inspired by Glyndebourne’s 75th anniversary, has asked some distinguished fellow-writers each to produce a work inspired by an opera. The result is Midsummer Nights — 19 short stories, plus Posy Simmonds illustrating the Glyndebourne experience with wry affection. Edited by Winterson, who also provides a story of passion and Puccini, the book offers a glimpse of how the inspirational and the creative juices interact. The brief was clear: ‘Choose an opera, and from its music or its characters, its plot or its libretto, or even a mood evoked, write a story.’ My, how differently a brief can be interpreted!

Some authors take a chosen opera and reconstruct it, changing time or place to suit their needs. Kate Atkinson updates La Traviata to the world of Hello! magazine, Alfredo now a star-struck Royal, Violetta’s fatal consumption replaced by superstar substance-abuse. Jackie Kay reopens The Makropulos Case by revealing how its heroine became immortal, shape-shifting through the centuries, to embody folk-singer, diva and a jazz queen named Ella.

In Colm Tóibín’s Freedom, the surface seems sunny enough, but beneath lies something darker: the narrator re-encounters the gay lover of his youth, now married, and recalls the school performance of The Pearl Fishers where it all began, the fierce sexuality they shared. Meeting again there is wine and wit, but behind the smiling banter is an open wound, for one of them at least.

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