What's it like working on an opera by an 11-year-old? Mozart's Apollo and Hyacinthus is astonishingly fresh, conductor Ian Page tells Michael Dervan

Opera Theatre Company is using the current year of Mozart celebrations to reach right back into the composer's childhood. The young genius of Salzburg hadn't even reached his teens when he wrote his first opera, Apollo and Hyacinthus. What's it like, I asked conductor Ian Page, to work on an opera by an 11-year-old? "One of the first things I said to the cast was that to do justice to the piece, and for the piece to be worth doing in the first place, we actually needed to forget fairly quickly the age of the composer." If it's only of interest because it's actually by an 11-year-old, he says, "then a recording would suffice". And, incredible as it may seem, given how many operas remain unrecorded, there's currently a choice of performances when it comes to Apollo and Hyacinthus.

"It's just astonishingly fresh," says Page. "Of course Mozart was so precocious and such an extraordinary child genius. But, also, he'd been all over the major courts of northern Europe, and he'd been exposed to so many different styles of music. You can hear so much of Gluck and even Rameau and Handel, lots of divided violas - the opening chorus feels straight out of a Gluck opera. And, as always with him, he takes a style and, even at the age of 11, he's sort of improving on it."

Apollo was not composed as a standalone opera for production in an opera house. "It was written in Latin, to be interpolated between acts of a far longer Latin play. Presumably it was part of the Latin education that, every year at Salzburg university they would put on a huge Latin play. It was in the same intermezzo tradition as Pergolesi's La serva padrona, where they would interpolate little scenes of music into a larger work. It was essentially that style. The Latin play had four acts, so each of these three acts - I think it's called a prologue and two acts for Apollo - would have been interpolated as a 20-minute musical interlude. The themes are shared between play and musical interlude. But the characters and plot are completely different.

"The story is taken from Ovid. For 18th-century audiences they've made what was originally a homosexual story into a heterosexual one, so they've had to create a new character or two. In the Ovid, Apollo comes down and falls in love with Hyacinthus, who is then killed in a discus accident." The priest, Fr Rufinus Widl, who devised the scenario of Mozart's Apollo, "created a sister for Hyacinthus, and Apollo fell in love with her. Zephyrus kills Hyacinthus and, to cover himself, pretends that it was Apollo, so they banish Apollo.

"What I find extraordinary is the final trio, which is full of the most sublimely generous-natured music, calm but imbued with an over-riding sense of generosity and forgiveness. And of course forgiveness is a theme that carries through Figaro and, to a greater or a lesser extent, all the mature operas. You can hear at the age of 11 he's already tapping in to that. Apollo comes back and forgives them for having jumped to the wrong conclusions and he transforms Hyacinthus into the flowers which will bear his name."

As a grisly aside, Page tells how in rehearsal jokes were being made about the discus accident, on the lines of "happens every day, of course". The principal cellist in the period instruments band for the production is from Manchester and remembered that, not so long ago, a pupil in a school in Manchester did actually die in a school accident with a discus.

Is there something, I ask Page, that marks music out as different to other art forms? While it's definitely odd to be mounting an opera by an 11-year-old, it's altogether harder to imagine the plays or poems or paintings of someone so young being taken so seriously. "It's probably more Mozart being different than music being different," he suggests. "But at the same time I think if Mozart had had to create his own libretto it probably wouldn't be worth doing.

"What he had an extraordinary facility for, which was trained as well as intuitive, was to pick up a style and a mood, and to be able to set music for it. So in a way he was created with a menu, with a list of arias and situations."

He points to Daines Barrington's 1769 report to the Royal Society in London, detailing how the young Mozart was asked to improvise arias conveying different emotions. He was able to deliver, "obviously, in quite black and white terms. I suppose there are only four or five fundamental emotions within the opera seria tradition. He was presented with a series of challenges which he was, even at the age of eight, equipped to respond to."

Page seems to be likening Mozart's achievement to the sort of role-play which children are so skilled at. "Also, I was reading a wonderful book recently by Declan Donnellan, who runs Cheek by Jowl theatre company. He wrote a fantastic, really intriguing chapter on the whole dichotomy about acting being about being truthful, and yet, linguistically, whenever we talk about acting, it's to do with being dishonest and putting on an act. He was talking about how as children we very quickly learn how to push the buttons and how to do an act, and as parents, you learn to do all the faces and all the stuff."

In working on Apollo, Page says, the reminders of the age of the composer have been genuinely few. "The word-painting is extremely black and white. You just have to enter into the spirit of it. Hyacinthus's aria is talking about the gods being menacing, and suddenly the strings go diddilliddillup. It's sort of Dr Who music."

Of course, Mozart would not be either the first or the youngest composer to have responded in that way to a text. "No. And there is something wonderfully playful about it as well. If you were being cynical you could dismiss it as being rather obvious. But it's done with such a vigour and energy that it's very captivating."

Page's enthusiasm for early Mozart extends back to the First Symphony, written at the age of eight. "I find it fascinating in the First Symphony that there is a voice there already. It's not just another very stylish JC Bach-type symphony. What's so extraordinary, and it does shine through with Apollo as well, is that it's not just a case of being technically prodigious. The emotional content beggars belief. He would have lost siblings when he was young. That would have tapped into things in a way maybe you don't have nowadays. But then that was very much a part of life anyway. But it does seem extraordinary. There's a wonderful duet near the end of Apollo. The scoring is sumptuous, divided violas overlapping, pizzicato bass. When you listen to that and tell somebody it's by an 11-year-old! . . . It's really astonishing stuff."

Ian Page conducts Mozart's Apollo and Hyacinthus, directed by Annilese Miskimmon, in an Opera Theatre Company co-production with the Classical Opera Company and the Classical Ensemble. It opens in Dublin tonight, and travels to Sligo, Mullingar, Dundalk, Armagh, Galway, Limerick, Cork. It will be seen in London, Basingstoke, and Bristol in March, in Tolentino in June, and in Nice in August. Details from www.opera.ie or 01-6794962