Burning issue: La Scala has commissioned a new work based on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Photograph: Haydn West/PA
With La Scala, Italy's most prestigious opera house, commissioning a new work based on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, opera looks set to tackle for the first time the issue of climate change. But it's far from new for opera to take contemporary or political themes as its subject matter.
In America especially composers and librettists have been mining that particular seam for the past 20 years. John Adams' Nixon in China, which premiered in Houston in 1987 and was then widely staged, takes a complex and subtle look at President Nixon's epoch-making visit to Peking in 1972, focusing on the attitudes and personalities of Richard and Pat Nixon, Henry Kissinger and both Chairman and Madam Mao, from a philosophical as well as political perspective. Adams followed up with the controversial The Death of Klinghoffer, premiered in Brussels in 1991, whose central event is the murder by Palestinian militants of the Jewish American tourist Leon Klinghoffer aboard the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro in 1985. Adams' next large-scale opera, Dr Atomic, about Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the atom bomb, opened in San Francisco in 2005 and comes to the English National Opera next year.
Adams is not only the best-known but also the best of a bunch of American composers who have made a speciality of what are now termed "CNN Operas", after the catchy newsworthiness of their subjects. Other pieces in the genre have covered such figures as Harvey Milk (composed by Stewart Wallace) and Malcolm X (by Anthony Davis). Marilyn Monroe has been the subject of three operas so far. Few of these pieces prove long-term artistic successes. In the UK, the Asian Dub Foundation's Gaddafi, commissioned by ENO, died the death on its first night. A musical rather than an opera, Jerry Springer: the Opera at least generated plenty of interest, as well as opprobrium, on its UK tour, cut short by Christian fundamentalist protests. Now one of its co-creators, Richard Thomas, is due to collaborate with Mark-Anthony Turnage on a new work for Covent Garden based on the life and death of the late model Anna Nicole Smith, which surely has some tragi-comic potential.
Going further back, there are plenty of political resonances - implicit or explicit - to be found in the works of Verdi, Wagner, Musorgsky or Meyerbeer, even if their contemporary concerns were often disguised by relocating them to earlier historic periods or legendary times. Nowadays directors usually move these same pieces right up to the present day, rather than back.
Whatever composer Giorgio Battistelli's take on Al Gore's magnum opus, some imaginative director could flesh out the visuals with video, multi-screening and SFX to give modern audiences the equivalent to the conflagrations, massacres and other spectacular finishes that Meyerbeer's grand operas provided his 19th-century Parisian public.
John Adams made Nixon a baritone and Mao Tse-tung a tenor. If Al Gore appears in Battistelli's opera, my guess is he'll be a lyric tenor - a voice type suitable for high-minded thinkers rather than winners. How about some other characters in the International Conference scene that will surely end Act 1 with a mighty ensemble of multiple conflict? Gordon Brown is surely a natural basso profondo. Tony Blair could be a coloratura tenor, like in Rossini, with lots of shiny top notes and oodles of vocal decoration, but not much heft lower down. And what of George Bush? Is it too late to bring back the castrato?
