Brief Encounter: the opera

"It's the film itself – a tale of doomed love – which I thought was so perfect and so beautifully written, directed and acted that it had to be an opera," says André Previn. Actually it was Previn's fifth wife, the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who suggested David Lean's 1945 movie Brief Encounter as the subject for an opera. "She was in a flood of tears by the end of it," the composer remembers, "and turned to me and sobbed, 'You must set this!'" In spite of the brevity of their own encounter – Mutter is now Previn's ex-wife – he remained wed to the project and the opera opens at Houston Grand Opera next May.

In creating an opera out of Brief Encounter – not at all like composing a film score, says Previn, and he's written many – he found scarcely anything to add to Lean's beautifully crafted film. Based on Noël Coward's one-act play Still Life, it portrays the thwarted passion between Laura, a respectable suburban wife played in the film by Celia Johnson, and Alec, an idealistic, married doctor portrayed by Trevor Howard, and set against the backdrop of a railway station.

"In the film, it's the way these people are that makes their encounters, though brief, so touching," explains the composer. Previn admits, however, that in the opera, "the score has to be a force of its own". Rarely has a soundtrack seemed so firmly glued to the narrative as Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto in Lean's Brief Encounter – from the dark sonority of the opening solo piano chords as the train steams in, to the rise and fall of the yearning melody as the love story unravels.

Some complain of the veneer of sugary romanticism clinging to the film through its famous soundtrack, while others wallow in the beautiful, if perilously sentimental, Russian music. Once experienced in the context of Brief Encounter, however, it's hard to hear the concerto without thinking of the surging emotions of the film's protagonists, who are prevented from expressing them by the social and sexual taboos of the 1940s. Surely in its use of these lush harmonies – Coward's favourite piece of music, incidentally – the film carried a daunting musical baggage? "I couldn't let the film's existing music influence me," replies Previn. "It would take away from the thematic material of the various characters and the setting. But it sure had an important score in the Rachmaninov," he adds.

The challenge facing Previn was to strip the existing melodies from his and our heads and give voice to those characters whose thoughts and words are conveyed in the film in a series of reflective monologues and flashbacks. The Tony award-winning John Caird, whose many stage achievements include the RSC's Nicholas Nickleby as well as the musical Les Misérables, is the adaptor and director. He and Previn spent two years mapping out the story, honouring Coward's "emotional texture" and deciding upon the scenic structure, finally deciding to retain the film's framing device of the station. Caird's libretto focuses on the theme of time – people's perception of it and how it is passing in their lives. "There's a lot of talk in the piece about mortality," says Caird. "What are we here for?"

"John and I had to make major decisions," adds Previn. "We used Coward's stage version and also his screenplay. The main point of contention, is do Laura and Alec consummate their affair? There are good arguments on either side ..." he reflects. In the opera they do."

Previn's next opera is not based on a film, he says firmly, although there are at least two screen versions of Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, about Thomas More, the first with a score by the renowned Georges Delerue, described in Le Figaro as "the Mozart of the cinema". More could scarcely be less in Previn's opera.