As I speak to Mark Campbell over Skype to his New York apartment, he is in an ebullient mood: the night before, he has written the magic words “The End” onto his 37th opera libretto, an adaptation for Des Moines Opera of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel whose title I’m not permitted to reveal. (At the time, coronavirus is a threat, but hasn’t yet caused decimation of the live music world, including the postponement of the premiere of his new Edward Tulane). Having hit the Send button, he’s just had his first proper night’s sleep for months: “it’s not only a difficult story but it’s a very dark story. I like to think that I don’t absorb the worlds that I’m writing about, but I do. You have to write from the inside – you write for a character, you have to know them, you have to know their language, you have to know what they're thinking.”
What shines through our conversation is that for Campbell, the story is everything. Of course, he is highly musically aware: in the opera he’s most proud of, Elizabeth Cree (based on Peter Ackroyd’s novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem), Campbell noticed in a workshop that the baritone sounded particularly strong singing an E and changed words around in an important aria to suit that particular singer’s voice. “He wanted to sound good, so why would you not do that? Language isn’t precious: structure and story are precious. Language is adaptable: if you don’t know how to adapt your language for opera, then you should find another form to work in. They're just words.”
In the sixteen years since the premiere of his first opera, Volpone, at Wolf Trap in 2004, the sheer volume of Campbell’s work has been impressive. But what also impresses is the range of his work: from large scale pieces with full orchestra and chorus down to chamber operas, two-handers and even monologues, from adaptations of literary classics ancient and new to original stories. To add some more examples: Pulitzer Prize-winning Silent Night, adapted from Christian Carion’s movie Joyeux Noël, about the 1914 Christmas truce where Scottish, French and Germans played football between the trenches; The Shining (classic Stephen King horror); The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs (industrialist biopics aren't exactly the bread and butter of opera); Empty the House, a painfully intimate three hander about family relationships; Later the Same Evening, an opera inspired by five paintings of Edward Hopper.
Campbell proudly announces that As One, for string quartet and just two voices singing one transgender character (“Hannah before” and “Hannah after”), is currently the most performed contemporary opera. He is quick to dispel any idea that As One is jumping on a political bandwagon. “I never want young librettists to lose their talent for telling a story. There are so many "issue operas" out there – there are operas about the environment, there's operas about #MeToo. I never want the story to be sacrificed for the issue, because audiences won't come. When I wrote As One, my first decision with my co-librettist Kimberly Reed, who is transgender, was to tell a human story about a character, not to deliver a lecture about gender.”
Much as he loves his home in New York, Campbell finds that he can’t write there (“I have an overly evolved social life, there’s just too much going on”). As if to make the point, a police siren starts up outside ("sorry, this is New York") and Campbell's dachshund, who has hitherto been lying peacefully on the sofa, sits up and joins in enthusiastically. Rather, for working days (which he distinguishes from business and administration days), he rents a place by the ocean, where his lifestyle is ascetic. “Typically my writing begins about four or five in the morning. I like to see the sun rising and if I'm with my dog, I take him out for his walk and that's fun for both of us. I typically work from about 5am to about 11am. By then, the world starts creeping in, and I'm not a good enough writer to push it away, the way I should. Then I take a nap – I love naps. They're not like I go to sleep and wake up refreshed: a nap is more a sort of trance state where I'm working on a problem, like a character problem or even a lyric problem. The next period of work will be right before I go to bed, which will be between 7 and 10. I don't like to eat very much when I'm working, I avoid drinking while I'm working. I become a monk and I adore it, it is the most euphoric time in my life. I love working on my writing, being alone and just focusing on a story and living with the characters.”