Murder, he wrote

Simon Holt's new opera was inspired by a report in The Independent about a 50-year-old murder mystery. Lynne Walker hears how he set the gruesome tale to music

When the composer Simon Holt came across a gruesome report in The Independent relating back to the discovery in 1943 of unidentified human remains found rotting in the hollow of a tree in Hagley Wood, in the Black Country, the story simply wouldn't leave him. "I've no idea what it was about it, but something seemed to come to me in a flash. I immediately envisaged a small-scale dramatic work, set in an intimate space like the Almeida Theatre. At that stage I had no concrete ideas and I put away the newspaper cutting and some jottings in a drawer. When the pianist Rolf Hind later asked me to write a work for him and the violinist David Alberman, and Almeida-Aldeburgh Opera approached me around the same time, it seemed a good opportunity to stitch the two projects together into one piece, Who Put Bella in the Wych-Elm?."

For Richard Askwith, the Independent journalist sent in 1999 to cover the reawakening of the Hagley Wood "tree murder riddle", it came as a total surprise to find the story surfacing four years later as the basis for a piece of music-theatre. "I was simply investigating an event that belonged to the past but which had been resurrected," he says. Back in the 1940s, a slightly sinister graffiti slogan, "Who put Bella in the Witch Elm?", had spread like a rash, giving the unfortunate victim a heightened profile, some sort of possible identity, and posing yet more questions about her unsolved murder. When fresh graffiti appeared on an old stone obelisk on the Hagley Hall estate half a century on, Askwith might have expected to find an old codger with a dark secret.

Instead - and this is what surprises him in Holt's choice of subject matter - Askwith found that the story was "basically a failure. Everyone has failed to come up with any solutions, no new light has been shone on the subject and everyone just shrugs their shoulders. But what is great is that Simon's libretto comes up with an answer - whether or not his artistic detective work provides anything more than yet another theory. That's better than real life, which just leaves unanswered questions hanging unsatisfactorily in the air. It's a tale that works far better as art than as journalism, actually, since he can do with it what he wants - shape it, be creative. But if I'd been asked to nominate a story of mine on which to base an opera, I'd never have chosen that one! It was a quick 24-hour job and I'd forgotten all about it."

What if Simon Holt's opera awakens old ghosts or, like a musical Crimewatch UK, disturbs some distant, dormant memories? Askwith isn't anticipating closure. "There are no new facts surrounding that newly-painted graffiti in 1999 and whether that was just put there by some young person who didn't know anything or by someone who was privy to what really happened. Would they necessarily hear of this new piece of music and consequently spill the beans? And if they did, would they be believed?"

It was all exhaustively investigated back in the 1940s, after three lads out birds'-nesting found rather more than they bargained for when they delved into a gnarled wych-elm and discovered a body stuffed down it. The police reconstructed a picture of the woman from the evidence around the skeleton: taffeta crammed in her mouth, a gold ring and a crêpe shoe. The fact that one of her hands had been severed and was found buried separately added black-magic execution to the wide-ranging list of death possibilities, including theories that she had been a spy, or had been made pregnant by a GI, or was a gypsy condemned to death by her fellow Romanies.

Holt isn't interested in arousing new interest in the story. For him, it's merely a potent starting point for a piece of dramatic music. Like the Greek legends which have inspired several of his works, the mythical aspect holds a strong appeal. "When I was a kid the first photo I ever took was of the tomb of the unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe. It's haunted me ever since - I'm fascinated by what can be spun around someone who is completely unidentified, a person with an unknown past who has become a legend. Unlike Greek myth, though, this is a real one, an extension of life."

Don't expect any tarot cards or a hand of glory in Who Put Bella in the Wych-Elm? - Holt found the witchcraft element all slightly tedious. "It's interesting enough but it's not what the piece is about. It is part of the colour though," he admits. Cathie Boyd, who's directing the première, is chary of dwelling too much on the cause of murder. "The case is open, you can't access the records, but something deeply suspicious was clearly going on, especially given that the skeletal remains later went missing from Birmingham University Medical School. But though one can't help but be aware of certain elements within the piece, I have to be honest to the music, not to any forensic evidence. I've not taken a literal approach, and though video images play a significant part in the production, the concept is simple and low-key, in line with Simon's own approach."

"I wanted it to fit in the back of a van," says Holt. "So that it could be put on in any space, toured anywhere. It's very definitely a music-theatre piece, as opposed to an opera. It's not conceived on any grand scale but is instead intense and chamber-like, claustrophobic, and at the same time constantly in motion, almost cinematic. The music has gone on a journey into itself, almost as if into the tree." It's beginning to sound as if he'd like the audience to feel holed up in that old wych-elm trunk with Bella.

Holt originally asked the playwright Caryl Churchill to write the libretto. "She was intrigued by the story but declined to get involved. After she had said no, which was disappointing, I realised that I now had the excuse, permission if you like, to write my own text. I took each angle, even the red herrings, and set them all down, pencil on paper, assembling a narrative which gradually took shape." His previous settings of Lorca (including the opera The Nightingale's To Blame) and Dickinson helped him to structure the words to suit the music already forming in his mind.

Who Put Bella in the Wych-Elm? is scored for just two vocal soloists, a baritone and a soprano, and, in a new departure for Holt, a pre-recorded electronic tape. It was the only way he could reproduce those otherworldly sounds and voices whispering, talking and murmuring in his head. With a small line-up of instruments - mandolin, cimbalom and marimba adding an exotic quality to the chamber forces of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group - the spotlight falls on Hind and Alberman, whose roles reach well beyond those of normal piano-and-violin recitalists. The part of Bella is somewhat supernatural, Holt suggests, not quite "queen of the night" in vocal range, but top Es do give sopranos an ethereal dimension.

He didn't visit Hagley Wood until after he'd finished writing the piece. "I wanted it to reflect my own angle on the story and where it's led me. I've used a lot of the facts that Richard included in his feature but I wasn't so concerned with reality. It had to be more about the character that I've called the Protagonist and about Bella. When I finally went to Hagley it was extraordinary seeing the obelisk. I walked towards it from a distance and there were kids putting more graffiti on it at the time. Then I saw the words, 'Who put Bella in the Witch Elm?' You can't not feel something strange if you know anything at all about the events." He's yet to view the actual wych-hazel (big and old enough also to be called wych-elm), an experience that he's postponing until after the première. If only trees could speak.

'Who Put Bella in the Wych-Elm?' is premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival (01728 687110) on 19 & 21 June at 8pm and is at the Almeida Theatre, London N1 (020-7359 4404) on 2, 4 & 5 July. Click here for the full text of Richard Askwith's original article.