Composer Jonathan Dove: ‘You can’t help what you want to hear’

For all that Jonathan Dove is one of the UK’s most collaborative composers, he values his solitude. “It’s fun to be among the thousands, but then I want to be on my own again. There has to be a chance to recharge,” he says. When we meet at his east London home — an atmospheric flat in a converted Victorian school — he has been spending more time alone than usual. His partner, formerly production manager at London’s Cervantes Theatre, is training as an actor in Madrid. Meanwhile, the composer has been beavering away at what looks, at least on paper, like one of his most unusual projects yet.

That’s Itch, which will be Opera Holland Park’s first ever world premiere on its main stage this month. Based on two young adult novels by the radio DJ Simon Mayo, it tells the story of a dorky 14-year-old science fanatic named Itchingham Lofte, who sets himself the challenge of collecting every element in the periodic table. In his search he discovers a new element — Element 126 — a substance of extraordinary but potentially destructive power, which sets him on an adrenaline-fuelled mission to stop his discovery from falling into the wrong hands.

Pairing Dove with the librettist Alasdair Middleton, Itch is an opportunity to welcome teenagers, a group that traditionally has not had much of a stake in opera. It is also a chance for Dove, who is known for his versatility, to tread new musical territory. Over cups of Earl Grey and rooibos tea, he says that the opera’s edge-of-the-seat plot has inspired him to write a new kind of energised music, while the characters have brought out some new pungent harmonies: “It’s always interesting to create music that isn’t just saying, ‘This is a baddie, watch out’, but that acknowledges the complexity of character.” Plus, says Dove, he has come up with a whole new sound for Element 126: “Something that is a bit ambiguous, something between shimmering and vibrating . . . Effectively, a whole new instrument to play with.”

It is invigorating to hear Dove, 63, describe his work as though it were a new toy. But while Itch’s alchemy of thriller-meets-geekery might make for a gripping novel, can it generate enough emotional intensity for opera? Dove is adamant that it can: “As the piece starts off, you think it’s innocuous and jolly, but then you realise that there are quite big things at stake, things that are worth singing about.”

The composer even goes so far as to liken Itch to Wagner’s Ring cycle: “You’ve got this substance of immense power that comes from the depths of the Earth and has to be returned to the depths: that is the journey of the Rheingold.” And, as with the Ring, Itch is rich in symbolism and allusion. “You could say that Element 126 is a metaphor for oil,” says Dove, who has written several works inspired by his environmental concerns. “Equally, you could read it in other ways. I think Itch raises questions about issues such as human ambition and the lust for power: how do we handle the resources we have? Do we deserve the opportunities we have?”

Finding operatic potential in the most unlikely of sources is a theme for this composer. In Flight, his best-known opera, premiered in 1998, he profiled the purgatory of a dull-grey airport departure lounge; in Mansfield Park (2011) he found unexpected ways of illuminating one of Jane Austen’s less celebrated novels through music. Dove himself struggles to rationalise his taste in operatic subject matter, which has also included Pinocchio, Karl Marx and Diana, Princess of Wales: “I’m not sure we have so much choice in the end about what grabs us in the moment and says, ‘Sing me’ . . . You just hear a story and smell music there.” Having now been in the composing game for three decades, though, Dove has reason to trust his instincts: he is one of the most theatrical of musical storytellers, and one of the most programmed contemporary composers in the world.

Growing up in Blackheath, south-east London, Dove learnt the piano, organ, violin and viola, while also cultivating a love of theatre. He devoted hours to making model theatres and went to see every production at the nearby Greenwich Theatre. Then, following his degree at Cambridge university, where he read music and studied composition with Robin Holloway, he worked for a time as a freelance accompanist and repetiteur, before becoming music adviser at the Almeida Theatre in north London.

Coinciding with some big commissions, not least his first community opera at Glyndebourne, Hastings Spring, Dove’s stint at the Almeida played a formative role: “I remember when Diana Rigg played Medea . . . she would always hit a ‘C’ on the line ‘Your heart is pierced’. It was very much composed into her ‘instrument’, as if she had found her own music for the role.” Dove continues: “I realised that I was kind of going through what the actors were going through: making choices they make [to refine] a performance.”

Like the best of actors, Dove knows how to read his audience. His works are predominantly tonal, often humorous, stylistically eclectic, with an energy that never sags. In his children’s operas, he has the sense to leave in the dark and sinister bits, while his tuneful idiom appeals to audiences of all ages.

That said, Dove has his critics, who see a lack of originality in some of his work. The composer himself is quick to emphasise that “everything I have done, Benjamin Britten has done first and better”. He does not subscribe to the notion, however, that writing tonal, accessible music precludes experimentalism: “When I started out as a composer I thought I had a vocabulary for magic and comedy. Since then I’ve ended up being drawn to subjects which go beyond that, and as each story has had its own demands, I’ve had to find new colours that meet those demands.

“There are days I’m excited by [music of the extreme avant-garde], but it’s not a language that I speak. I’ve found a different way that I can be articulate to my satisfaction. And I don’t think you can help what it is that you want to hear.”

Dogma evidently sits uneasily with this composer, who strives to ensure that his works don’t come across as lectures. But what, if anything, does he hope that listeners do take from his music? Dove’s characteristically jovial answer is “a good night out”.

“My experience of a satisfying theatre experience is feeling restored, reconnected in my humanity and reminded of what we are capable of.” Is that what he would like to give to his audience? He laughs, as if half-embarrassed: “There’s no harm in hoping.” 

‘Itch’ runs July 22-August 4, operahollandpark.com