A BESTSELLING book, a film starring Keira Knightley based on a previous novel and now an opera. Ian McEwan, Britain’s leading literary author, is adding another string to his bow.

He has teamed up with the composer Michael Berkeley to write the libretto for a musical work called For You, which will be performed for the first time next spring.

The opera tells the story of a 60-year-old composer whose sexual and professional prowess have passed their peak.

McEwan and Berkeley, who lost the only copy of a score he had written for an opera version of Jane Eyre eight years ago, turn 60 next year. Both deny there is anything autobiographical in their portrayal of Charles, the fading composer.

“We both had the idea that we wanted to work on something together about sexual obsession,” said McEwan in an interview at the Edinburgh book festival.

“I came up with the idea that it should be about a composer in late middle age who is losing it, sexually and musically.”

The opera will have its premiere at a theatre at Brecon in the Welsh hills. It is a somewhat more modest venue than London’s Guildhall, where McEwan’s On Chesil Beach is among the favourites to pick up this year’s Booker Prize, or the Venice Lido where the film version of Atonement, starring Knightley as a second world war nurse, opens on Wednesday.

“There is not a shred of Michael in my composer,” said McEwan, who won the Booker in 1998 with Amsterdam in which a central character, Clive, is a composer, albeit of light music.

Berkeley, however, is more circumspect. “I do realise that people are going to think that this composer might have some of me in him,” he said.

The plot of the opera involves the collapse of Charles’s marriage to his wife Antonia. Both have a new admirer: Charles’s is their Polish housekeeper. But he seduces a female horn player instead, only to find that his sexual appetite is greater than his virility.

Music is one of McEwan’s great loves and he is himself a reasonably good flute player. The author, who earlier this year revealed how he had been reunited with a long-lost brother, says he “can hear tunes in my head” when he writes the lyrics.

Several of his books have episodes where music plays a role. On Chesil Beach features Florence, a violinist, as its main female character.

Berkeley is the son of another composer, Sir Lennox Berkeley. His first opera, Baa-baa Black Sheep, was premiered at the Cheltenham festival in 1993 to critical acclaim. It was based on a story by Rudyard Kipling and took five years to complete.

His score for Jane Eyre went missing, believed stolen, as he unpacked his car outside his London home. Berkeley, the godson of Benjamin Britten, offered a £500 reward but had to rewrite it.

He and McEwan have been friends for more than 25 years. Their new collaboration has an interesting coda. Berkeley’s wife, Deborah Rogers, is McEwan’s literary agent.

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