At 44, the singer and songwriter Rufus Wainwright is shortly to loose his second opera on the world. Hadrian, which opens in Canada later this year, will tell of the Roman emperor’s long relationship with his lover, Antinous. And creating it has been a reverent, careful step for Wainwright, who says that opera now serves as his “religion in many ways”.
“I’ve often gone into the opera house in quite a state yet come out completely transfigured, so when I gear up to work in that world, it is like I am going into the clergy,” he tells the Observer.
On 22 June, Wainwright, who has built up an international following with his swirling, emotionally candid melodies, performed in the grounds of Kenwood House in London and then at Coventry cathedral to adoring fans. This week he will be doing gigs in Whitley Bay, Leeds and Bath. Yet he is full of disappointment about the pop world. “I always loved opera, and now the mainstream pop business has imploded and is not something I can relate to any more, it opens up the territory for a bunch of other things.”
Far from waving farewell to his past, however, Wainwright is announcing the dates of a new tour that will bring him to Britain next spring to celebrate his first two albums, released two decades ago. “I’m excited to examine that material again,” he says. “At first I thought I’d even perform the albums back to back. I haven’t discarded that idea, but it would be a long evening.”
His lack of faith in the pop scene is partly due, he says, to all the “incredibly talented and rich and successful young people out there who are still obsessed with making more money and with being the centre of attention”. He cannot see why these stars, once they make it, would not want simply to make the music they like, instead of serving an industry. He was lucky, he now suspects, not to have had great fame and cash thrust upon him at an early age: “I know when that happens you create this machine around you that has to be fed, so I guess I dodged a bullet in not having that occur.”
Wainwright, a Canadian-American who grew up in Montreal and lives in Los Angeles, says he is “definitely at one of those vantage-point periods” of his life where he is enjoying looking both forward and back. He was 24 when his first, self-titled album marked him out from the crowd in 1998. Today, eight studio albums later, he is a healthier, gym-going performer, happy with his achievements.
And the tour is not the only challenge ahead: Wainwright has been back into the studio in LA to record a new album with the leading US producer Mitchell Froom. “They are songs that bubbled up during my years doing operas, and getting frustrated with directors and conductors and opera houses. So I’ve been going into a room and singing them all to fuck off.”
Unsurprising, then, that people have a hard time categorising Wainwright. He has been hailed as a balladeer, a troubadour, a torch song singer and even as “the king of baroque pop”. But for him the point is that he does not produce commercially safe work. The trouble with the music industry, he argues, is that the value of the song lyric has been undermined. And it is a trend he regrets all the more since the death of Leonard Cohen in 2016. The fellow Canadian was grandfather to Viva, the daughter that Wainwright shares and raises with his old friend, Lorca Cohen. “Lyrics are the wood the ship is made from, as opposed to the sail, the music. Writing them is an art form in itself and having known Leonard very well, I know losing him was a great passing of that concept.”
Melodies, Wainwright says, come to him naturally, as “a function of my body”; lyrics though, he has to “fashion and test out”. “It’s not that I am such a great lyric writer, but I do know what makes a great lyric. That’s maybe because I am actually a really great singer, I can feel it in my gut,” he playfully suggests.
Wainwright and his younger sister Martha, the folk rock singer, sprang together from a deep well of music. Their father is the singer and actor Loudon Wainwright III and their mother, the late Kate McGarrigle.
“No matter whether we were at a dinner party, or at a restaurant, if there was a piano around, my mother, after a couple of drinks, would usually end up drawn to it,” he remembers. “She was almost stricken with this musical mania. I need music in order to survive, but she was particularly afflicted. And what at times was even annoying, now seems wonderful to have experienced.”
Wainwright turned his back on a potential career in classical music when Loudon handed a tape of his son’s music to the producer Van Dyke Parks. But he does not blame his father for the subsequent change of direction. The two have had their conflicts, notably chronicled in the son’s song Dinner at Eight, but family peace now reigns. “I was fortunate. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I would have made it come hell or high water, but I do owe a lot to Loudon – and he owes a lot to me. We owe a lot to each other, Loudon and I. It is nice now to be able to receive and to give.”
While Wainwright admits this is not opera’s most popular age, he does detect a tipping point on the horizon. “With what is going on politically, art and music will have to start to express the sense of horror and sadness and angst. And opera still holds a kind of gravitas that even children see. They know it is profound and it impresses them.”
Hadrian, which was composed for the Canadian Opera Company, follows Wainwright’s first opera Prima Donna, which premiered at the Manchester International Festival in 2009. Sung in English and Latin, Hadrian was inspired by the French author Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1951 account of the emperor’s affair with Antinous and is to star the leading American baritone Thomas Hampson. By shining a light on Hadrian now, 1,880 years after his death, its composer hopes to tackle “some pretty contemporary issues”.
“Hadrian created Palestine and was responsible for the first big Jewish massacre that occurred in documented history,” says Wainwright, referring to the Great Revolt of AD 66-73, the first recorded war between the Romans and the Jews in Judea. “So the borders he initiated are still being fought over. And a lot of the issues of homosexuality are identical today. Exceptions were made then, but the love between Hadrian and Antinous was a bona fide relationship and seen as very wrong.”
His new work qualifies as an opera by anybody’s reckoning, Wainwright says. Importantly, it is through-composed – meaning the music doesn’t repeat itself – and will be performed unamplified. He is aiming, he says, for the kind of timelessness the best operas achieve.
“My goal would be to recreate that freshness of effect with my work. And maybe it is my annoyingly positive attitude, but I feel I am laying this massive trap that all of these young people will stumble into suddenly as they get older. After all, a certain percentage of those young wild people at Glastonbury will end up sitting through the Ring Cycle one day.”
When Wainwright performed at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden over five nights in 2010, box office receipts showed that three-quarters of the audience had never been there before. “So the opera world needs me!” Wainwright laughs, revealing his plan for a third and final opera. “That would be my last, because it is so labour intensive. And it is financially insane when you have a daughter to put through school and mortgages to pay.”
All Of These Poses Anniversary Tour 2019 will bring Wainwright to the Royal Albert Hall in London, and to Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow in April next year.