Bliss

"Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him, and it is this first death which we shall now witness." Peter Carey begins his first novel, 1981's Bliss, with the backyard death of its hero, the "good bloke" Harry Joy. Adapted by director Ray Lawrence for the 1985 film starring Barry Otto, the Miles Franklin Award-winning novel will this month be transposed to the Opera Theatre.

Carey's hero comes to the conclusion, after being Packer-Whacked out of his near-death experience, that he is living in Hell. Opera fans are reminded of the classical task of escaping Inferno, one so common it attained parody status with Offenbach's 1858 operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, as well as the 2003 musical Jerry Springer The Opera. Hell is a great location with interesting characters, so the choice of adapting Carey's quirky tale of malaise, incest, arson and redemption, both very dark and very funny, coincides nicely with the art form's trajectory.

The music is by Brett Dean, probably Australia's most prominent composer overseas. "For me, the orchestra is a great instrument for exploring psychological states," Dean says. "For example, there's a recurring motif whenever Harry talks about being in Hell. It has an inner murmuring about it, but also has a very strident bass clarinet solo that noodles around quite dramatically. That's an attempt by me to capture where Harry is: quite possibly physically, and also mentally."

The "mad scene" also has a long history in opera; what orchestration does a 21st century composer use to convey a state of insanity? "A lot of it has to do with non-pitched instruments like percussion," Dean says. "Often, very subtle sounds in the percussion section can add a lot of atmosphere, and atmosphere in a theatre is really what it's all about. Some of these are sounds that you feel rather than hear. There's a very subtle but quite apparent heartbeat that's played by a MIDI keyboard, taken from a real human heartbeat. It's something that you may not necessarily hear with all the sounds but you'll certainly feel it because it's coming from a big sub-woofer at the back of the stage."

Like many composers of opera, Dean is treating a story already familiar to most of his audience. "The piece is in people's consciousness," he says. "When you talk to people about Bliss they always ask: ‘Are you going to have the scene when fish fall from between Bettina's legs?' [No], or  ‘Is there going to be an elephant sitting on the car?' [Yes, but maybe not live on stage.]

The librettist who had to make such choices is Amanda Holden, a distinguished English translator of opera, and founder-editor of the Viking/Penguin Opera Guides. (She is not, however, the TV celebrity of the same name often appearing in Britain's Daily Mirror.) Dean says her libretto is "a work of genius, because it's crystallised the essence of what's a multi-layered book. You can't follow a novel scene-by-scene or page-by-page. Stories in opera unfold quite a deal slower. You've always got to give moments for the singers to really sing about something. You constantly have these passages that are almost frozen in time."

Indeed, the book's ending - Harry's third and final death - is not included. The opera ends in a sonnet such as Così Fan Tutte's librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte might have written for Mozart, sung by Harry and his lover Honey Barbara, with the final couplet: "If you would seek salvation, remember this:/A life in Hell can still aspire to bliss."

Bliss is directed by Neil Armfield and stars Peter Coleman-Wright, two Australians greatly admired by opera fans both here and abroad. An orchestral suite of excerpts titled 'Moments of Bliss' has already been performed in England by Simon Rattle and Coleman-Wright, to critical acclaim. This very Australian work seems destined to attract a global audience, but there may be international competition for tickets, because only five performances are scheduled in Sydney. Jason Catlett