Nicholas Maw: It's the libretto, stupid

Sophie's Choice hasn't opened yet at Covent Garden, but it's already astonishing the public: a new opera that has sold out its run weeks in advance. Its composer, Nicholas Maw, explains what the art-form requires to make it both serious and successful. By Tom Sutcliffe

It's more than 30 years since Nicholas Maw, now 67, last faced an operatic premiere. Which makes it rather surprising that the Royal Opera House managed to sell out all performances of Sophie's Choice, Maw's new opera, weeks in advance of anybody hearing a note (the premiere is a week tomorrow). There had been plans for an introductory promotional CD, but when the ROH saw how well booking was going, they realised they needn't bother.

Of course, the story was a famous novel by William Styron and then a successful film with Meryl Streep. The conductor is Simon Rattle, the director Trevor Nunn, and the cast is led by the powerful new German star Angelika Kirchschlager, head-ing a whole raft of bankable names such as Rodney Gilfry, Dale Duesing and Gordon Gietz. Maw, chuckling, says they "adore each other. They hug each other all the time. Things are going extraordinarily well."

Maw's opera is difficult to stage. It has 18 scene changes, moving backwards and forwards between time and between place. "I believe that operas should be true theatrical experiences," he says, although his method of presenting the story seems pretty cinematic. Nunn keeps the narrator on stage almost throughout – something Maw hadn't expected. The opera is a carefully managed assembly of flashbacks, in which Sophie makes her significant life choices – not just the one deciding which of her two children should be condemned to the gas chambers. She chooses not to join the Polish underground. She chooses to work for the camp commandant, and exploit her connection with her father's anti-Semitic tract. She chooses to commit suicide with her crazed Jewish lover Nathan in New York, riven with guilt at having managed to survive the Holocaust (her young son's fate unknown).

Maw's 1970 Glyndebourne opera, The Rising of the Moon, was a carefree Anglo-Irish romance from the time of the famines that coincided with the resurgence in the Troubles, rather tactlessly as some thought. Maw at the time described his opera as designed for pleasure. It was 90 per cent full for 16 performances over two seasons. But the critics were frankly snotty. Will the Holocaust prove a similarly problematic backdrop? Styron has been attacked for watering down the special "victim status" of Jews, as Sophie is Polish. Maw says anyway it's not an opera about the Holocaust, or about Auschwitz. "What attracted me to this subject matter was the fact that it was contemporary in its sensibility. It's extremely important to us how one state-size group of people behaves to another," he says, indicating Kosovo. The Marriage of Figaro and La Traviata were politically dangerous subjects when new.

Like Styron's novel, he takes memory as his method. His main motivation, he says, is "to put real characters on stage. I am not interested in mythology. And when one is doing that, abstraction in the music is out. In the concert hall it's fine. But on the opera stage you need specificity." So the music is "an ongoing lyrical conversation", a Straussian notion, involving a flavour of traditional devices such as recitative and aria. There are moments when feeling or response has to be heightened, he says. Song is the most intense, unique way opera has of representing feelings, psychology, reactions. Sophie gets semi-arias in each of the work's four acts. Near the end the narrator even sings a duet with his younger self, Stingo. There are complete settings of poems by the American poet Emily Dickinson.

The most successful and important 20th-century opera composers, Maw points out, are all great setters of language. He cites Richard Strauss, Janacek, Britten, Shosta-kovich, Berg and Prokofiev. Ninety-five per cent of the libretto, which he arranged himself, comes straight from the novel. "Frankly I wouldn't trust myself to write a libretto from the ground up, but here I was adapting a text that already existed." He's less than happy about the use of English surtitles at the Royal Opera, which he thinks ridiculous as the opera is being sung in English. Yet he concedes that in the United States surtitles have helped to make audiences much more comfortable with opera-going.

The experience of working for the ROH has transformed his view of opera. Ever since Nicholas Payne signed him up for Sophie's Choice in 1996, reversing a decision by the previous Royal Opera leadership six years earlier to drop the project, Maw has found the management very reassuring and supportive. He was fully involved in the casting, which was not easy, as he teaches in Washington and has lived in the US since 1984. The Royal Opera accepted with alacrity that the principal roles had to be played by real Americans.

The Rising of the Moon was a real success. But it didn't lead anywhere. There was a feeling in the trade that Maw's Straussian exuberance in orchestration and his slightly Brittenesque melodic writi-ng were awfully old-fashioned. Maxwell Davies's Taverner, premiered at the ROH in 1972 and revived in 1983, was thought by some to be much more worthwhile. Maw's Irish opera has been revived four times, rather well at the Guildhall School and in Wexford, but much altered – to his disgust – in Bremen and Linz. His attitude towards opera became very jaundiced. But he wouldn't have been put off opera just by a load of critics with an inflated sense of the necessity of Modernism.

In any case, his music is less conservative than it seems. He's a quite difficult and demanding figure, who admires Verdi enormously and is crusty in a rather Verdian way about his work and his career, which have not been plain sailing – even though he has earned the passionate support of Sir Simon Rattle. With the CBSO, the conductor launched Maw's monumental orchestral epic Odyssey in 1991 to considerable success, and he remains a huge enthusiast for Maw's writing.

But go back to the 1969 LP of Maw's milestone vocal cantata Scenes and Arias for three female soloists (a fabulous piece), and it's surprising how patronising is the tone of its sleeve note by the composer and journalist Anthony Payne. Payne points to a "slightly unsteady and unpredictable stylistic progress" and refers to Maw's "eclectic idiom", code for naughty lush harmony and singable melodic fragments, which someone touched by the tradition of Schoenberg and Webern should have resisted.

Maw knows it's not his reputation that has made Sophie's Choice a sell out. Perhaps he will one day be as popular as John Adams, whose (admittedly more accessible) music he admires. But he isn't yet. Maw's Romantic violin concerto for Joshua Bell showed the way that the wind of popular taste is blowing. Its musical style, blending Vaughan Williams and Georgian English lyricism with a sturdy Schoenbergian intensity, can speak eloquently to the intelligent musical public. Maw has now simplified his operatic style even further. If the result resembles English Prokofiev, it's likely that the future belongs to somebody with their feet in the Modernist past who is not force-feeding us with a sort of musical Cubism or Abstract Expressionism.

What prevented Maw becoming Britten's successor as generator of repertoire works was a succession of baulked opera projects. Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer's Night had been sold off to Sondheim to become A Little Night Music by the time Maw approached the Swedish film director. John Arden's Sergeant Musgrave's Dance had been pencilled in for Broadway four years ahead when Maw contacted Arden (though the playwright was initially enthusiastic and offered him a shortened TV version of the piece, which could have slipped neatly into libretto form).

The biggest disappointment was Maw's dream of turning Bulgakov's great novel, The Master and Margarita, into an opera with his friend Hugh Whitemore as librettist. The problem was the translator Michael Glenny, who owned the British rights and had done a wonderful job turning it into English. He insisted on being involved, which Maw wouldn't accept. There are sketches of music and Whitemore's words, but Maw never resolved the problem – though after Glenny's death it should be a project worth reviving, since York Höller's version at the Paris Opera sank without trace. With luck, Maw's future will be much more operatic than his past. It's a big job, and he's needed.

'Sophie's Choice'; Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020-7304 4000; www.royaloperahouse.org), 7, 10, 16, 19 & 21 Dec. Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 on 10 Dec