First a play and then a film classic of the 1970s, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant remains one of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's most celebrated achievements. In the text, composer Gerald Barry also detected the potential for an opera - and now, more than decade after his idea first formed, the result has finally been performed in its entirety.
It has been commissioned jointly by the Irish broadcaster RTE and English National Opera; ENO will get the stage premiere in September, while the RTE National Symphony, conducted by Gerhard Markson, gave the first public performance as a concert.
It has been worth the wait. A final judgment on some aspects of Barry's conception must wait until it reaches the opera house, but the score is unmistakably thrilling, and its approach to music theatre strikingly original. All of Fassbinder's wordy text is included, not set to music in a conventional operatic sense (though Barry's way of dealing with words, often faster than normal speaking speed and totally avoiding any kind of florid decoration, is striking in itself) but part of a total musical context in which the vocal lines are just one element.
In fact, the words often get submerged, for Barry's fondness for hefty brass-writing creates problems in a drama that is essentially a series of dialogues; whether the acoustics were partly to blame, or whether it was the result of having the orchestra behind the soloists, rather than in an opera-house pit, was hard to say.
The story, dealing with a 30-something fashion designer's disastrous affair with a much younger woman is dramatically tight and unswerving. There are just five singing roles, all female, and their conversational exchanges are sometimes savage, sometimes bleakly comic, though Barry never pauses to make such obvious dramatic points. His music rampages along, with furious brassy marches and toccatas, cutting across the vocal lines and often suggesting a totally different emotional scenario altogether.
It is all extraordinarily exhilarating, and this performance under Markson had real cumulative intensity. Rayanne Dupuis was magnificent as Petra, with Mary Plazas as her love Karin, and Stephanie Marshall, Deirdre Colling-Nolan and Sylvia O'Brien as the rest of the ménage. Now we just need to see it on the stage.
· The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant opens at the London Coliseum on September 16. Box office: 020-7632 8300.
