David Mitchell: Adventures in opera

'You must keep the crazies at bay at these things," one groupie-magnet novelist had warned me after my very first reading, but Klaas de Vries, the composer who approached me after an event in The Hague in 2006, seemed sane enough, as did his wife, a singer and theatre-group operator. They asked me for 20 minutes, so we found a table down a side lobby of the Royal Theatre and ordered tea and something apple-and-butter rich. Klaas wasted no time in getting to the point: in 2000 a firework depot exploded in the city of Enschede in the east of the Netherlands, killing 23 people, injuring 947, and levelling an entire neighbourhood: had the beautiful weather not persuaded many inhabitants out, the toll would have been far greater. To commemorate the Vuurwerkramp disaster, Enschede city council wished to commission an opera for the Nationale Reisopera, based in Enschede. Klaas, a senior Dutch composer and professor of composition at Rotterdam Conservatory, had been approached to write the music: he had come to my event to ask whether I would write the libretto, in part because one of my novels includes a fictitious composer who had persuaded Klaas that I knew my musicological stuff.

I declined the offer for three reasons. First, I don't know my musicological stuff – my fictitious composer's knowledge had been cribbed from essays in CD booklets. Second, Enschede was a Dutch national disaster and not a British one; and how kindly would British critics take to a Dutch librettist being brought in to work on a project commemorating the Hillsborough disaster or the 7/7 attacks in London? Third, the project sounded like an ethical Mission Impossible: surely, for survivors, a "docu-opera" about Enschede would only scalpel away scar tissue?

Klaas understood my "Thanks but no thanks", mentioning only that reason two needn't trouble me: Enschede city council was hoping that the opera might have an afterlife beyond 2010 and the Dutch-speaking world, which meant an English libretto was an asset, not a rudeness. (Composers whose mother tongues are spoken by a relatively modest number often prefer an English libretto for the same reason.) A firm commitment having been ruled out, then, our 20 minutes expanded into two hours while we discussed how we might have approached the commission, if I had accepted it.

Our ideas had three sources: Georges Perec's 1978 novel Life: A User's Manual (which works through a 10x10 grid of rooms in a Parisian apartment building, describing the lives of the inhabitants); the Dutch nocturnal habit of leaving curtains undrawn, rendering the interiors visible to unseen passers-by; and the busy rectangle of rectangles you get in the corners of cable TV screens that shows what's on other channels. Klaas, Gerrie and I agreed that one way to honour the commission without transgressing laws of taste could be to stage nine stories in nine rooms, on an ordinary evening in an unnamed city. Nine stories would unfold simultaneously: eventful stories, quiet ones, sad ones, comic ones, thoughtful ones, brash ones. The nine occupants of the 3x3 grid of rooms would sing four lines each when the "spotlight" visited his or her room. There are just three rounds, so each singer has only 12 lines to convey character and plot, but when the spotlight is elsewhere, the stories in each room continue to develop, like nine silent movies showing simultaneously. Different members of the audience would follow those storylines that won their attention. After the third round, a sonic representation of a disaster (not the disaster) would occur, finishing the main act with a suggestion that the occupiers of the nine rooms would also cease to exist.

I proposed to Klaas that I would write, in film-world terms, a treatment – a synopsis of a not-yet-written script. My mercenary self figured that at least I'd have the bones and organs of nine short stories to show for the effort. What's more, I was already enjoying the taste of collaboration – a rare spice for a writer who lives in rural Ireland. We agreed to meet at Klaas and Gerrie's house in Haarlem a month later, where my hosts would pay for my work with lunch. Writing the nine characters' back-stories without writing their 12 lines apiece seemed miserly, so I worked on their lines, too. The challenge of packing so much human luggage into so few syllables with rhythm, rhyme, assonance and alliteration was addictive and gratifying – not unlike sudoku, now I come think of it.

After the month was up, I cycled to Leiden from the small town in Holland where I was living, and caught the bus to Haarlem. Any local will agree that the bus is an idiotic way to get from Leiden to Haarlem: the trains are frequent, punctual and fast and cost only ¤5.40, while the buses are no cheaper and definitely prefer the long and winding road. At one point the driver ushered the passengers off and drove away, leaving a lady in her 80s to explain (in House of Windsor English) to the bewildered foreigner that the Haarlem bus would be along in 30 minutes. During the long journey, however, I performed a 180-degree change of mind: my "treatment" was looking very like an advanced first draft of a libretto, so when I finally arrived in Haarlem, I lay out my "Nine Rooms" schema on Klaas's kitchen table and asked if the position of librettist was still vacant. It was.

The next stage was a trip to Enschede to visit Roombeek, the area flattened by the 2000 explosion. An intelligent urban renewal project has produced a thriving new neighbourhood, with a triangular grassed-over plaza where the firework depot stood. A crater – perhaps 20 feet across and about 10 deep – is filled at the annual rate of one symbolic shovelful of earth. Two rhino-sized, glassed-over holes high up in an overlooking building mark the entry and exit of a giant lump of concrete hurled hundreds of feet by the blast: seeing them, the death toll appears miraculously low. On that trip I also met the council executives responsible for commissioning the opera. Dimwittedly but thankfully, I didn't twig that this was a sort of job interview until I was on my way home, so all went well. Crucially, Guus Mostaart, the director of the Nationale Reisopera, gave his approval to Klaas's and my ideas for the opera, and now the work began to take shape, with Klaas composing music for, and around, the words that I provided.

Stephen Langridge was appointed director, together with Conor Murphy as designer. In the libretto, meanwhile, the nine singers in their nine rooms had been joined by nine actors who "co-tell" the stories, but who are all outside/offstage at the end and so survive the fate of the building. (It didn't occur to me that a cast of 18 is unhelpfully large; I've been forgiven.) Over further lunches around Klaas and Gerrie's table the "Nine Rooms" section became Act 2 of a four-parter. Act 1 is a requiem, and Act 3 is a sonic landscape composed by René Uijlenhoet, a colleague of Klaas's at Rotterdam, to represent the destruction of the building housing the nine rooms. It fills the theatre like the sea. This is interwoven by snippets from the (fictional) survivors' testimonies and spoken by the actors. One difference between a disaster and a hospital ward is that there's no chance to say what needs to be said, so Act 4 became an "impossible conversation" between the Living, the Dead and Memory, the latter being represented by the chorus. The opera's title, Wake, finished ahead of its cleverer rivals because the word, and its double meaning, is the same in Dutch. Its third English meaning, the wake of a ship, also felt appropriate. Occasionally Klaas would ask if he could change a phrase to make it easier to sing, or for a few extra lines, but there was none of the aggro that artistic collaboration is supposed to entail. The ending caused me a lot of mental head-scratching. On the one hand, opera abounds with tragic endings, but what to do when the tragedy is genuine? On the other, if the audience leave the opera house burnt-out and devastated, Wake is less a commemoration than a shot of pain. A discreet diamond of an eight-line poem by Wordsworth, called "A slumber did my spirit seal", ends the work, we hope, with peace and solace.

One last incident in Enschede deserves its own paragraph. On a second visit to the city to present a progress report I encountered a one-man demonstration against the opera. He was sitting outside the council offices under a placard announcing (bilingually, for my benefit) "WAKE IS LIES". The accusation may have been a bit premature for a libretto not yet even finished, but it reminded me that the disaster is the BC/AD division for the lives of many citizens of Enschede. That night I went through the entire libretto line by line while imagining that I was watching the premiere sitting next to someone who had lost a daughter or a dad in 2000. If I noticed my imaginary companion flinch or shoot me a resentful glare, the line had to be reworked. I didn't change much, but I did change some, and if anyone knows the WAKE IS LIES man, you can tell him that my gratitude for his moral hazard sign is genuine. He may still hate what I wrote, but every single line was weighed and weighted with care.

At the end of last month, I spent three days at rehearsals in Enschede. For fulltime librettists and songwriters, hearing one's words from the mouths of gifted singers must all be part of a day's work, but I'm not sure I can convey the kick to be had from creeping into the dim-lit auditorium where sentences written many months ago are being sung by a mezzosoprano at 80 decibels. I say "sung", but "ignited", "burnished" and "set spinning" are in the mix too: opera singers' bodies are both instrument and amplifier, and there is something of the welder and the alchemist about their vocation, too. Watching, I remembered my first sight of my debut novel piled up in a bookshop at Hong Kong airport in 1999 and feeling a sense of transgression, as if the Arts Police might nab me and sentence me to 15 years for imposture. (The critics may yet do something similar after Wake's premiere, of course.)

Novelists are prone to banging on about characters "telling me what they'll do next" but this is just to sprinkle our grubby selves with mystique. Where drama is involved, however, the word is made flesh, literally, and with attitude. Over a beer or two, some of the cast told me how they had fleshed out their stage personae. Some details had been tweaked during interviews with Stephen Langridge, and others the performers had dreamt up on their own. For example, I learnt that my character Spider's real name is Simon (which fits him as snugly as his thermal underwear); that the gay survivor whose partner dies after Act 3 was planning on dumping his lover, so now he has unextinguishable guilt as well as grief to labour under; and that the teenager (whose parents are out having their who-gets-what-after-the-divorce conversation on the evening of the disaster) despises himself for being too well brought-up to slam the doors he so badly needs to slam. It's both wonderful and ego-dwindling to understand that "my" creations aren't mine any more: an artistic version, perhaps, of watching your children grow up and leave home.

Wake's premiere will be held 10 years to the day after the explosion. No doubt it'll be a nerve-racking night. My novels are reacted to anonymously, hundreds or thousands of miles away, and if a critic puts the boot in I can stop reading the review. Continental opera audiences, however, will cheerfully boo any member of the production team deemed worthy of opprobrium – nowhere more so (I am told) than in Germany, a mere 20-minute cycle ride from Enschede. Whatever happens to Wake I feel grateful that Klaas first thought of me as a possible collaborator. So keep the crazies at bay, yes, but not so blinkeredly that you lock out those uninvited non-crazies who have something to teach you.