MOST COMPOSERS, like Garbo, want to be alone. Solitary communion with Nature seems the best way to get the old note-spinning faculties going. Mahler retreated to a Salzkammergut lake each summer and emerged with a new symphony. Britten stared moodily at the Suffolk reeds. Maxwell Davies found his muse in Orkney. John Adams has a cabin deep in the woods.
But few can have found a more perfect tranquillity than Poul Ruders. From Copenhagen you take an hour’s train journey to a town so sleepy it might be called Mogadon. Then a taxi carries you into a land of flat fields and vast horizons. Ruders, a gaunt, gentle giant in his early fifties, is waiting at the end of a track. But the journey is not yet over. The last half-mile must be done on foot, across furrows and ditches. Finally you reach an old farmhouse — low-ceilinged, smoky, snug, wrapped in the undisturbed silence of centuries. It’s a hermit’s paradise: the fever of life forever banished, it seems.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Within these walls are conjured violent, thrilling sounds that are shaking the musical world. Not for years has a new opera wowed the critics and enthralled the public as Ruders’s version of The Handmaid’s Tale has done. Premiered three years ago in Copenhagen in a staging by Phyllida Lloyd, the Dane’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1986 bestseller was acclaimed as a modern masterpiece: savage, satirical, yet lyrical, evoking both a brutal totalitarianism and private tragedy. “I knew when I wrote it that I had done a good thing,” says Ruders. “But I am surprised that it has gone down so well. So far, anyway. As we know, history is the ultimate judge.”
It is. But meanwhile the awe of contemporaries isn’t a bad litmus test. And The Handmaid’s Tale looks like being one of the most popular operas of our time. Productions are planned in Washington, Minneapolis and Toronto. And next week it gets its British premiere when Lloyd’s staging comes to English National Opera.
Atwood’s novel, filmed in 1990, is a grim fable of the “Republic of Gilead”, formerly the United States. The country has been seized by Christian fundamentalists who have imposed repressive laws and deprived women of education, property and rights. “It’s the Old Testament perverted,” Ruders says. A nuclear spillage has rendered so many citizens infertile that women deemed to have committed a sexual offence — adultery or giving birth out of wedlock — are brainwashed and assigned to childless households as “breeders”. Once a month they are impregnated by the husband while they lie between his wife’s legs. They are called “handmaids” after the handmaid in Genesis who fulfils this function for the barren Rachel. The Handmaid's Tale tells how one of them perilously rekindles her capacity to love and to rebel.
Ruders read the book while living in London in 1992. “I thought: it’s the perfect operatic subject,” he says. “It has everything. Suppressed emotion, illicit sex, violence and, most of all, incredible tenderness. Plus all those ostentatious things like processions, ceremonial impregnations, public hangings.”
But what most swayed him was a hunch that music could add a new dimension to Atwood’s story, not merely lush it out like a film score. “It’s not what I call a finished book,” he says. “It’s virtuoso writing, sure, but it’s open-ended, full of mystery and whispers. I felt convinced that, as a composer, I could create a parallel universe. I would never have chosen to make an opera out of Sophie’s Choice, for instance, and I’m surprised that Nick Maw did. That is completely wrapped and saturated already: everything’s there. Music can add nothing.”
Ruders got his chance to turn The Handmaid’s Tale into music when Elaine Padmore, the British administrator then running the Danish Royal Opera, asked him for a new opera. “I was scared,” he says. “I had only written one opera before, which bombed. Sank like a rock! I called her and said: ‘OK, but it must be The Handmaid’s Tale.’ After she read it, she said: ‘Yes, but it will need one hell of a librettist’.”
Padmore knew the right man: the British actor and writer Paul Bentley. “He is a real theatre animal,” says Ruders. “Because he performs so much himself, he knows, for instance, how long a character might take to walk upstage. His libretto is jammed with stage directions.”
Ruders gave Bentley only one instruction: that the wall — the execution spot where women who have rebelled are hanged — appeared early on. “To catch the attention of the punters straight away,” he says. “Opera must also be entertainment. You have to convince an audience paying good money to watch my stuff for three hours. You must make sure they aren’t bored.”
There isn’t much chance of that with Ruders’s music playing. Trained as an organist, he never took composition lessons, and says that he didn’t find his style until in his thirties (“but I was in no hurry”). Now his music has a tremendous breadth of reference and an emotional span that goes from the darkest melancholy to brilliant Post-Modern irony. The full portfolio is deployed in The Handmaid’s Tale. Amazing Grace is heard, distorted, to capture the warped fervour of the fundamentalists; and Bist du bei mir, a beautiful 18th-century air once attributed to Bach, is used to evoke the fleeting happiness of the handmaid’s life before the nightmare of Gilead. But elsewhere Ruders unleashes the full snarl of the modern orchestra, plus electronics.
“I have tarted up the story, as a film director would,” he says, disarmingly. “But it had to be put over to a big audience. It’s not a string quartet. I think Margaret Atwood understood that when she saw it. She said: ‘Yes, of course, it’s opera. It must hit you between the eyes’.”
In the 18 years since Atwood wrote the book the world has changed in ways that not even a great futuristic writer could have predicted. And with each change readers have found new meanings, new contexts, for her satire. When she wrote it, the Soviet Union was still a totalitarian monster, and Reagan and Thatcher were imposing right-wing agendas on the West. When Ruders and Bentley were preparing the opera, they saw Gilead’s repressive misogyny almost exactly mirrored in Taleban Afghanistan. Then came September 11, and now the backlash. What does Ruders think the story says now?
“It’s a warning against intolerance in any shape or form,” he replies. “Look around you. We are surrounded by it. The novel was a frighteningly prophetic piece of writing.”
He admits that, since its sensational premiere, he has been bitten badly by the theatre bug. “The only thing I want to do now is write operas,” he says. And in that snug Danish farmhouse he shows me huge stacks of manuscript paper filled with words and music. It’s his next epic, half finished: an operatic version of Kafka’s The Trial. Nobody will ever accuse Ruders of shirking the big subject.
The Handmaid’s Tale opens at the London Coliseum, WC2 (020-7632 8300), on April 3
