Richard Morrison

With their lust for power, political figures make great operatic subjects

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I have good reason to remember the May morning in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher won her first general election. That day, I was being interviewed for a job on a scholarly periodical at a famous publishing house (I didn’t get it, so I drifted into the grubby world of daily journalism instead). I found the interview eyeopening. The panel - senior academics in the cultural field - spent most of the time wailing that, in their eyes, the election result signalled ‘the end of civilisation’. It’s fair to say that, in the following 11 years, the cultural and academic world’s despair at the arrival of Thatcherism hardened into outright loathing.

So, I will be intrigued to see how (as we report on page 30) the divisive figure of Mrs T has been turned into the leading character in an opera - an artform her government did very little to support. But I will also be interested to discover how this new piece, by the composer Joseph Phibbs and historian Dominic Sandbrook, fits into what is now almost a genre in its own right: operas focused on modern political figures. Over the past 30 years I’ve seen so many that I feel I could compile a history of the 20th century using only arias.

Of course, composers in earlier centuries also used opera to express a political view. Think of Monteverdi dissecting Machiavellian scheming in