When opera meets drama, anything can happen. At one unforgettable Wexford Festival rehearsal a director and a tenor - who must, regrettably, remain nameless - were grappling with a scene in which the tenor and his soprano engaged in a lover's tiff. The director wanted raw, visceral emotion; the tenor intended simply to show off his beautiful voice and, if necessary, wave his arms about a bit. There was a great deal of discussion in several, animated languages; the rewind button was hit with increasing force as the scene was played over and over again.
Suddenly the director - a large American woman - howled, ran at the tenor (an even larger Russian), grabbed a fistful of his jumper and shoved him viciously backwards until, staggering, he hit the rehearsal room wall. There was a moment's astonished silence as everyone in the room wondered whether to leave or be witness to a murder. Then she let go and, as the singer cautiously smoothed himself down, told him sweetly; "Now that's the sort of mood we're trying to reach here, OK?"
You learn a lot about opera by eavesdropping on rehearsals - which is why the "workshop" format has been chosen for a new six-part autumn series on BBC 2, Jonathan Miller's Opera Works. Each 45-minute programme will take the form of rehearsals for a different aspect of opera as Miller, a group of young singers from Manchester's Royal Northern College of Music, a handful of guest artists and the series' musical director, Charles Hazelwood, hammer out Handel and push Puccini around. No set, no costumes, no orchestra and no rules - just informed and no doubt intriguing discussion of the nittygritty of staging opera, all under the baton, so to speak, of the inimitable and irreverent Miller.
"If MTV did opera, this is how they'd do it. This is opera unplugged," says series director Patrick Uden, who also produced and directed Miller's marvellous 1978 TV series on the history of medicine, The Body In Question. "Opera, normally regarded as stuffy and arcane, is brought to life through Jonathan's humour and no-nonsense attitude to the great operatic librettos."
The first programme, on Monday night, will focus on the operatic ensemble, using one of the greatest examples of the genre, the complex and farcical Act II finale from The Marriage Of Figaro. "Unlike in a play, where characters can't talk over one another without causing confusion, when a group of characters sings over one another in an operatic ensemble, it adds to the drama," says Miller, who stresses how, on stage, "less is more"; subtle movements will always have more dramatic impact than grand, operatic gestures. He then moves on to one of the trickiest ensembles in the repertoire, the Rude Mechanicals from Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and transforms Shakespeare's five craftsmen into a group of lads in a bar.
Programmes two and four deal with the duet, the aria and the recitative as Miller makes the singers play "hard to get" in the love duet from Puccini's La Boheme, reveals the structure behind the explosive emotions of the soprano aria from Tosca and contrasts spoken and sung versions of the dialogue in Carmen. Programme three, scheduled for Monday September 15th, tackles the tricky question of the chorus. "How can I distribute people around a stage so that they don't simply look like a 20headed monster coming in simultaneously all on one cardboard cutout?" laments Miller.
To illustrate how ridiculous some choruses can appear, Miller begins by rehearsing a pastiche of the famously robust chorus from Act II of Rigoletto, where the courtiers enter and tell their story en masse to the Duke; "At worst it looks like a singing strippergram," he declares. He also takes the pomp out of the march of the Masonic priests from The Magic Flute - "a sort of Egyptian ice show" which is often performed complete with high-camp tea-towel headgear - by comparing its restrained formality to a group of middle-class mourners gathering for a suburban funeral.
The final programme in the series looks at the operatic death scene, usually perceived as "overblown, overacted and never over", by means of a deconstruction of the final act of La Boheme. Why, when it's done properly, is it so harrowing to watch? Because, says Miller, no one notices Mimi actually die - which is, in the end, what death is all about. "She just slips away," he says. "Because that's how you go when you do go. You just stop." By the end of the final performance, both Miller and the cast end up in tears - but on the way, he indulges in some of his funniest parodies of operatic nonsense, reducing his actor-singers to uncontrollable laughter. Sounds just like opera should be.
The first programme in the series Jonathan Miller's Opera Works will be shown on BBC 2 at 11.15 p.m. on Monday.