I predict a riot

When Peter Maxwell Davies and I were commissioned by the Royal Academy of Music and the Juilliard School in New York to write a new opera for the students, we both felt we should write something not only for students but about students, giving them for once the chance to play themselves. Max and I have now written three operas together. All were strongly determined either by the conditions of their commission or by prevailing personal circumstances. No one writes anything in a void, so being an unreconstructed baby-boomer, and a student at Cambridge at the time of the Garden House hotel riot – though not, sadly, a bearded and balaclava'd participant – I quickly came up with the theme of student activism, partly because of the fact that, at that point, three or four years ago, there wasn't any. In any case, music students are notorious for their general disengagement from the world – hardly surprising, given the ferocious technical demands of playing or singing music well. Practising five hours a day doesn't leave much time for riots.

As we thought we were commemorating something that had ceased to exist, we wanted the subject to be student activism itself, rather than one single case, so we chose three true stories set respectively in Nazi Germany, in China during the cultural revolution and an American story from the civil rights era. Since then, the zeitgeist has played two little tricks on us: student protest in the UK has come out of hiding and "docu-opera" about real, near contemporary figures is bang in fashion thanks to Anna Nicole.

Opera regularly takes historical characters as its subjects, from Elizabeth I to Boris Godunov, but "docu-opera" is slightly different, playing with the tension between a highly unrealistic medium and a real-life story that we recognise. The original "docu-opera" was Verdi's La Traviata, revolutionary in its day for its contemporary dress and featuring the life, albeit highly romanticised, of a recently dead person. "Zeit Opern" – operas of the time – were a common feature of Germany in the 1920s, when Hindemith wrote a media comedy called Neues vom Tage (News of the Day), and even Schoenberg attempted a (very unfunny) comedy called Heute Oder Morgen (Today or Tomorrow). The modern vogue for "docu-opera" really got under way in 1987 with John Adams's deft and witty Nixon in China.

Nobody could accuse Anna Nicole of being romantic or romanticised – Mark-Anthony Turnage's opera is in fact more satire than documentary, and it is curious that the characters selected for celebration in "docu-operas" have often been somewhat trashy. Not so Sophie Scholl, who, with her brother, Hans, were leaders of Die Weiße Rose, the small group of students at the University of Munich who, in 1942-3, produced and distributed leaflets protesting against the National Socialist government, until they were caught and guillotined. Their story has already inspired at least one opera and several films, but the uniqueness and the purity of their engagement under the most extreme circumstances marks them out as very special models of citizenship.

The simple testimony of the Scholls, delivered in our version by young people the same age as they were, asks many questions. They were typical representatives of that deep strand of German intellectual culture that we still recognise. Today, surely, the German middle class is more cultured, better educated and more politically aware than its British counterpart. If we extend this fact back in time, we can imagine how cultured and intelligent this class was then, and impale ourselves on the conundrum of how it was so easily overridden by National Socialist barbarity. The Scholls pose that question with an awesome force. Their example gives the opera its name: Kommilitonen!, which in German means "fellow students" – comrades in arms – the word that opened their final leaflet which they rashly distributed in the entrance hall of the university shortly before their arrest.

But it's clearly sentimental to imagine that student activism is always on the side of "right" or "truth". The cultural revolution in China, which features in our second story, provides many examples in which the irresponsible and carefree idealism of students was cynically manipulated and driven towards violence and oppression.

In John Pomfret's book, Chinese Lessons, the veteran correspondent revisits the students with whom, 20 years previously, he had shared a dormitory as a trail-blazing American exchange student in China in the 1970s. One of the students was the son of university professors who were murdered by red guards. The son, tainted by his parents' political status, rehabilitates himself by joining the army, and, by denying his parents, is eventually able to become a member of the Communist party and so gain a place at the newly re-opened university, where he goes on to become a history lecturer, like his father, and write a history of the cultural revolution. But still he refuses to name the people he knew were responsible for his parents' murder. This compromise is emblematic of China's very partial accommodation with its recent history.

For the third story I wanted an American element in honour of our Juilliard School partners, and was keen to find a case of student activism that did not end in violent death. I eventually chose the story of James Meredith, who, in 1962, after a gruelling campaign of bureaucratic warfare, became the first black American to register at the University of Mississippi. Bureaucratic warfare turned into real, murderous, race war, and several thousand US government troops had to be deployed to enable this one black man to walk up the steps of that university without, as he says in the opera, a mop in his hand. He continued to need two US Marshalls at his side throughout his three years as a student.

Meredith is one of history's great loners – an isolated and determined figure who also knew how to manipulate guilt in others for his own ends. The details of his exploitation of the agonised liberalism of the Kennedy/Johnson administration to force his project through are too complex to relate in an opera, especially bearing in mind that the southern white supremacists were mostly Democrats whose votes Johnson still needed. But his is one of the most striking stories of individual action triumphing over powerful vested interests and political prevarication. His cussedness deserves our wholehearted admiration.

These are highly political stories for an opera – no love interest in sight. Of course music cannot actually say anything about politics – music is just music. But political ideas refracted through music achieve a different dimension. The reality of politics on the ground may be too full of practical detail to make good opera, but opera, through being narrated by music, automatically lifts ideas on to an emotional and imaginative plane and we see political ideas in a different light. After all, both Mozart and Beethoven wrote intensely political works, so there is nothing outlandish about the idea.

As far as I know, there is no precedent for a single opera that has three stories – plenty of operas barely have one. (Puccini's Il Trittico comprises three distinct one-act operas.) I decided from the outset to weave our three stories together, allowing them to meet and interact towards the end. However, in order to keep the three narratives clear, there had to be three distinct styles. We therefore tell the Meredith story as a mono-drama, reflecting in theatrical form the historical truth of Meredith's lonely struggle. The Chinese story is highly stylised, conceived as a sort of parody of one of Madame Mao's "revolutionary operas", with ballet, puppets, and that particular kind of epic gesture that belongs to the genre. The intellectual and cultural milieu of the Scholls is evoked through scenes of theatre within theatre in which Dostoevsky and Goethe are dramatised as part of their discussions of political morality.

Peter Maxwell Davies has matched this plan with three distinct musical styles, drawing on music from the civil rights movement, strident Maoist marches and intricate, reflective music in the German tradition. There is a lot of chorus work, stage bands, even an on-stage Erhu, a traditional Chinese violin – in total more than 90 participants and a dizzying schedule of costume changes. The carefree complexity with which I as the librettist wove three stories together presents me as the director with intriguing traffic issues.

It is somehow a fantastic trick of the age that student protest has once more burst on to the streets and made this "docu-opera" a creature of its time. However, the shining example of the Scholls does urge a qualifying note. They were protesting not about issues that only affect students, but about the moral destiny of their country. If we are to recover a sense of public participation in politics, then the students, among others, should also lift their sights above the parapet of mere self-interest. Maybe our little opera will inspire some of them to do just that.

David Pountney is intendant of the Bregenz festival. The premiere of Kommilitonen! (Young Blood!) by Peter Maxwell Davies, directed by David Pountney, is on 18 March at the Sir Jack Lyons Theatre, Royal Academy of Music, London NW1.