When Errollyn Wallen was studying composition at the University of Cambridge, as a postgraduate in the 1980s, she had to write about a work by the English composer Michael Tippett.
“I made such a fantastic discovery about that piece,” she says. “I just went to the university library and took out a book that had never been taken out since the library acquired it, in 1937, and it answered everything that I needed to know. Isn’t that incredible?”
Wallen is telling the story because the background image I use for online calls shows the Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin. Her opera, Cautionary Tales, which she composed in 2010, based on the stories by Hilaire Belloc, is on its way to Ireland for the first time, for a series of performances by Opera Collective Ireland.
Opera “is, for me personally, one of the most natural forms to work in”, she says. “And it comes from childhood, you know, the idea of dressing up, with music, words, playing. I’ve had the opportunity to write over 20. I’m now on my 23rd. They’ve all been for different situations, different-size ensembles. Some have been for a huge cast; some are just small chamber works.
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“But any opportunity I have to write for the stage I take it. Because there’s so much to learn, not just from the performers, but also the teams you work with, the directors, the librettists, the dramaturge. I’m very drawn to the form.”
The first opera Wallen saw in the flesh was from the early end of the repertoire, La Calisto, by Francesco Cavalli, which she went to on a school trip to Glyndebourne. This mid-17th-century work came only 44 years after Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo of 1607, the earliest opera to be an undisputed masterpiece. She calls it a “more stripped-away version of opera”, but “one that stayed with me”.
But even before that, she explains, she had been inspired at home – by placemats, of all things. “In fact,” she says, “I found one here the other day. It has pictures of scenes from Carmen. It shows dancers all dressed up, and the reproduction is a very lurid colour.
“I would have sat looking at these stagings – you know, sets and scenes – every dinner time. So much so that I remember announcing that I wanted to be an opera singer without knowing what an opera singer was. But I knew it involved throwing myself around. So it’s really nice that I now work in the form.”
A lot of composers she speaks to struggle with opera, Wallen says – “the fact that you can’t hear the words, the fact that sometimes the voices sound ... maybe overblown, and the plot’s a bit ridiculous. But once you’re working in the form yourself you start to understand more deeply why certain things are the way they are”.
Her favourites, she says, are possibly Puccini’s Tosca and Britten’s Peter Grimes. “And, in a funny sort of way, they’re linked, with the orchestra so powerful in setting the scene alongside the story and the singers – that idea of being able to achieve an integrated whole where every element in the score is almost complete.”
Wallen recalls a semi-staged Peter Grimes at the Royal Festival Hall in London with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Edward Gardner. “That was a revelation to me: just a few scenes acted out with a tiny bit of costume, but it was the most powerful experience.
“It reminds me of the duty to the score. I think sometimes directors would do well to really study the score, really study closely the music. Because with something like Peter Grimes it’s all there in the music; it tells you what to do. We almost didn’t need a set. It is the atmosphere.
“Opera at its best can really convey this powerful emotional force and the complexity of it. Through the music and the voices you can create this counterpoint of complex emotions. Yet at the same time it can be amazingly clear.”
Wallen suggests that, in opera, “composers are often underestimated. Writing an opera, we have to see everything ourselves; we have to take care of everything. Like, I sometimes invent backstories for my characters, so I really know about them”.
“I think people feel that all composers do is just write the music and that we have no understanding of the whole range of drama that we’re dealing with. But with opera, more than anything, everything has to work in that score. That’s the fun part of it.”
The score, Wallen says, “has many answers. That’s all because the composer will have questioned themselves over and over again about what might seem like a simple chord. Everything is part of this architecture where the smallest details really do matter”.
She composed Cautionary Tales because the English company Opera North, which is based in Leeds, “wanted an opera that was for children and that could tour with small forces. I think we had a choice of subjects, possibly Shockheaded Peter or Cautionary Tales. I really wanted to work with Cautionary Tales, and I can’t tell you why exactly – I would have remembered it from my childhood".
Wallen points out how specific comedy needs to be, and how clear the words need to be for children. “Pia Furtado, who was directing it, adapted some of it, so, though we’re using the words of Hilaire Belloc, scenes are framed with extra text.”
She worked on the opera at a particularly challenging time in her life.
“My father was very sick and dying. So as soon as I handed in the full score I had to get on a plane to organise my father’s funeral. And then, while I was there, I had to slightly adjust some percussion parts. So it’s funny: it’s such a joyous opera, but also in the background was this rather sad story.
“But I really enjoyed working on it. It’s got just four singers and three instrumentalists. But it sounds very rich. Each tale is like a little vignette and takes its starting point from a Bach prelude or fugue. I don’t know why that is. It just occurred to me and it seems to work.”
One reviewer pointed out that it was an opera without much tenderness. “The fact is these are brutal, brutal poems, aren’t they?” Wallen says. “Every child is a neglected child, with parents that don’t care about it. The child is just high-spirited or wayward, and they all come to a terrible end. But, the thing is, children understand that too. Children tell you the truth.
“I also once made up an opera with children. It was called Clothesburger. The children had to provide some lyrics, and I was astonished with what came back. Because I thought in a million years I could never have such ingenuity and the ability to come up with the no-checks, freeflowing imagination. They’re wonderful.”
Wallen, who as well as being the first black woman to have a work performed at the BBC Proms, in 1998, was awarded an MBE in 2007 and a CBE in 2020, has been master of the king’s music since August 2024. She is the first black composer and only the second woman to hold the position, an honorary role whose holder often composes pieces for royal occasions such as weddings, jubilees and coronations.
She describes all of this as being like “an out-of-body experience. But I always carry my inner child with me. She’s very precious to me, because that’s the little girl that just dreamed things that nobody around me was dreaming and they didn’t understand what I was saying”.
“I didn’t understand it then. But I am living the life of that seven-year-old. I was dreaming of these things and of sounds,” Wallen says. “It’s marvellous having recognition and accolades, but it brings a responsibility with it, and that responsibility is always to music, to really try and do the best I can do for music.”
Errollyn Wallen’s Cautionary Tales, staged by Opera Collective Ireland, tours to the Mermaid Arts Centre, in Bray, Co Wicklow (Saturday, September 13th), Civic Theatre, in Tallaght, Dublin (Tuesday, September 16th, and Wednesday, September 17th), Solstice Arts Centre, Navan, Co Meath (Friday, September 19th), and An Táin Arts Centre, in Dundalk, Co Louth (Sunday, September 21st). Wallen’s new short piece Flourish gets its Irish premiere from the Chineke! Orchestra at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Tuesday, September 30th
