OK, so far it's just a rumour, but it could prove to be one of the biggest opera stories of the 21st century. And that's no hint of hyperbole: Pierre Boulez is writing an opera based on Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, to be premiered at La Scala in 2015. Or, rather, he might be. Charles T Downey at Ionarts picks up on the hint dropped by Renaud Machart in a bizarrely un-Boulezian context, a review of Krzysztof Warlikowski's production of Verdi's Macbeth at La Monnaie in June. Thanks to Downey for this translation of Machart's Le Monde article:
"The director decided to remove the chorus from the stage and positioned them in the theatre's highest balcony, the 'paradis' – it worked when they were portraying the witches … the sound thus obtained had a 'spatialised' richness, which, without requiring any electronic aid, could be of interest to Pierre Boulez for the opera that, according to our sources, he will adapt from Beckett's Waiting for Godot, planned for La Scala in Milan in 2015."
That's one of the weirdest segues from Verdi to Boulez you'll ever read, which either means Machart knows from his sources that there's real substance to the Godot rumour, or he's just stirring the gossip mill. It's certainly true that Boulez has wanted to write an opera for a while. Talking to the Telegraph in 1996, he confirms that he corresponded with the playwright Jean Genet about working together in the 1960s, as well as the German writer Heiner Müller in 1995, and that a year later he was thinking about adapting Edward Bond's plays for the opera house. None of these plans ever came to fruition. Indeed, every time I met Boulez in recent years, he always refers to writing an opera as a distant dream – if he could ever find the time outside conducting. He must feel that any piece of music-theatre he writes will almost certainly be his only contribution to opera, as he will be 90 in 2015; Godot would be his one and only shot at operatic greatness.
The problem is, he has a lot to live up to, not least his own assessments of the state of contemporary opera: "no opera worth mentioning has been composed since 1935", "a Beatles record is certainly cleverer than a Henze opera", and operas by Berio, Birtwistle and Bernd Alois Zimmermann don't push "the frontiers of theatre, and that's the possibility that has always interested me". But let's dream the dream with Pierre and hope that he can get it together with La Scala for 2015. As Beckett puts it in Godot: "Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance!"
