Inspired by Orwell

A librettist's verses have their moment of glory when they suggest a melody to the composer. Then they are expendable,' said WH Auden.

In a spirit of mischief, I relay this comment to composer Lorin Maazel and the two librettists of his opera 1984. It causes an uproar.

'What?' gasps the poet JD McClatchy. 'Expendable?!' splutters Maazel. But dramatist Thomas Meehan thinks for a moment.

'Opera is about the music,' he says. 'A librettist is definitely a second-level person. I have no problem with that.' A thrill of creative tension jolts the room and I lick my lips. After all, Verdi, Puccini and Strauss had bloody battles with their librettists. Am I about to witness a modern day equivalent? More of that later.

1984 is Lorin Maazel's first opera and receives its world premiere at the Royal Opera House next Tuesday, directed by Robert Lepage. During a rehearsal break, I meet the composer and his two wordsmiths backstage and ask them how it all started.

'I think 1984 is the greatest roman â¡ clef of the 20th century,' says Maazel. 'I had a few other subjects in mind but when I re-read Orwell's novel I knew it had the stuff of great opera in it. It's like Tosca or Don Carlos - a love story set against the background of a police state.'

Maazel elected not to write his own libretto but asked renowned dramatist Meehan (co-writer of The Producers with Mel Brooks) to do the job. Meehan agreed but wanted to collaborate with poet and seasoned opera librettist McClatchy.

We started rapping immediately, challenging each other, trying to figure out the dramatic structure,' says Maazel. 'For example, the love story doesn't really start until Part Two of the book. But Thomas said the heroine had to appear in the first 12 minutes. I thought: "Why apply these rules to an opera that hasn't been written?" Now I realise his instincts were right.'

Once the structure had been agreed, Meehan and McClatchy met twice a week to write the words in which Simon Keenlyside plays the paranoid hero Winston. 'We wanted to create opportunities for arias, a love duet, a trio, a Newspeak patter-song, and so on,' says McClatchy. 'But a canny librettist also knows ahead of time when to step out of the picture and trust the composer. Music can say so much more than three extra paragraphs.'

With the finished libretto propped up before him, Maazel then began work. Did he start with the big love duet and work backwards? Or compose his leitmotifs first? 'No,' he admits with a shrug. 'I started out very unprofessionally at the beginning and worked forwards inch by inch.'