Mark-Anthony Turnage: A life in music | Music | The Guardian A life in ... Mark-Anthony Turnage: A life in music 'A 19th-century courtesan is grist to the mill of opera composers. But because Anna Nicole died in 2007 it makes people uncomfortable' Mark-Anthony Turnage. Photograph: Philip Gatward Saturday 22 January 2011 02.59 EST First published on Saturday 22 January 2011 02.59 EST Share on Messenger Close Two years ago Covent Garden announced that it was to stage a new opera by composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. It would be based on the life of Anna Nicole Smith , the Playboy model who became a tabloid sensation by means of her brief marriage to an 89-year-old billionaire, the subsequent courtroom battles over his will, the lurid details of her life and the sordid circumstances of her death, aged only 39, from a drug overdose in a Florida hotel room in 2007. The Guardian arts pages responded with a snap readers' poll. " Is the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith a good subject for an opera?

" it asked. "And for a moment or two that did shock me," recalls Turnage. "It's not what you're used to, but pretty quickly I realised it was actually an appropriate response in that the opera deals with modern celebrity, part of which seems to involve public voting for TV programmes such as Big Brother and X Factor and all the other reality shows. Of course the result of the poll wouldn't have affected what we did [the final vote was 78.2% for and 21.8% against], but I was actually quite pleased to see that the public agreed with us." Turnage, who despite turning 50 last year is still widely regarded as one of the most prominent younger British composers, admits he is "slightly ashamed" to be familiar with X Factor. "How can I put this? It is on in our house and although I don't pay that much attention, I'm always amazed that no one has picked up that they all sing sharp." He was also "half-aware" of Smith during her life and when invited by Covent Garden to write an opera she came to mind.

"Finding subjects is always difficult, but her life was undoubtedly very operatic." Anna Nicole opens on 17 February with a libretto by Richard Thomas of Jerry Springer: The Opera fame and directed by Richard Jones. Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek will sing the lead. "The more we looked into it, the more interesting it got," Turnage says. "There is all the modern celebrity stuff of cosmetic surgery, drugs, dramatic weight loss and gain. It also has the big eternal themes of love, death, jealousy, marriage, sex and money. And it's hardly unknown in opera for the morally suspect soprano to die in the last scene. But also the details are fascinating. She was from a dirt-poor background, her mother was a sheriff; Marshall, the old man she married wasn't stupid, he was a former Harvard professor who had written textbooks about oil." Smith's notoriety has continued after her death with controversies and conspiracies about questions of paternity and the supply of drugs. She was even the subject of a WikiLeaks diplomatic cable reporting the chaos her presence had wrought on the government and media of the Bahamas. The immediacy of her story appealed to Turnage.

"The trouble with a lot of operatic subjects is their distance from today. I'm not against using myth or history, and obviously I'm aware that both can have relevance to me and to now. But in reality it hardly ever grabs me like that. It too often feels that it's just about Orpheus and becomes rather worthy stuff to which you fall asleep. It's what Richard Jones calls 'classy snooze'. Which is pretty much the definition of what I try to avoid." Turnage's willingness to engage with the nitty gritty of contemporary life is matched by his openness to popular music: most obvious has been a love of jazz, with nods to such artists as Miles Davis, going back to the very beginning of his career, but he doesn't deal exclusively with such respected work. Careful listeners to his 1988 opera Greek, the piece that established his reputation, might catch a hint of the old ITV World of Sport theme tune. More recently, at last year's Proms, his Hammered Out echoed Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)". A few weeks ago he premiered a string quartet at the Wigmore Hall.

Two of the movements of Twisted Blues with Twisted Ballad were inspired by the Led Zeppelin songs "Dazed and Confused" and "Stairway to Heaven". Led Zeppelin's bassist John Paul Jones, a friend, was in the audience that night and will be on stage at Covent Garden for Anna Nicole, playing in scene requiring a jazz trio. This attachment to popular culture, along with his status as an Arsenal fan and willingness to embrace bad language in his librettos, soon saw Turnage cast as a working-class wunderkind. But over the past three decades he has sustained a distinguished and productive career that has seen him working closely with conductors of the stature of Bernard Haitink, Esa-Pekka Salonen and, particularly, Simon Rattle. He has been attached to prestigious institutions, such as English National Opera and both the BBC and Chicago symphony orchestras, and has written a vast range of music for many different instruments and ensembles. He says he has surprised himself in now writing a third opera – "I was very wary of the whole idea of opera when I started out" – and even more surprised to see, in hindsight, themes emerging across his work.

"I always want to do something different, which is part of the reason I've written an opera only every 10 years. But there are plainly interests that I'm drawn back to which seem to boil down to the importance of family members. This piece is actually very different from either Greek, which was based on Oedipus so that was pretty obvious, or The Silver Tassie [his 2000 opera for ENO based on Sean O'Casey's play about a footballer injured in the first world war], but the family thing has cropped up again. Originally we weren't going to have Anna Nicole's son, Daniel, who himself died of an overdose before his mother did, singing. But then towards the end I gave him this aria, which is just a huge list of drugs. At another point the whole family is wheeled out to say what they think of her. Maybe I'll manage to steer clear of families if I do another one, but there does seem to be something about them that keeps pulling me back." Turnage was born near Grays, Essex, in 1960.

He says while there are members of his family in traditional local industries, his own working-class identity was "seriously overdone in the press in the early stages of my career, to the point of making my parents furious. I'm not entirely blaming the journalists because I did play on it a bit, but ultimately it seemed to come down to the fact that I like football and came from Essex. In fact I grew up with lots of books and music in the house. My dad sang and my mum played the piano and while my upbringing might be different to, say, Tom Adès or George Benjamin , if you go back a generation, to the likes of Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies , they came from very ordinary backgrounds." They were an evangelical Christian family; Turnage was "quite absorbed" in religion before ultimately "becoming disillusioned and moving away" while retaining a respect for faith, particularly as something for his parents to turn to after the drug-related death of his brother.

"He died before I'd had children" – he now has three and "another on the way" with his third wife, the cellist Gabriella Swallow – "but now I can see it as a parent and simply can't imagine what it must be like to lose a child. Anything that helps is important." Turnage's compositional career began "pretty obsessionally", aged nine. "I'd have too many crotchets in a bar and things like that, but still wrote symphonies and concertos. I could recite every composer's dates and would etch their names on to my leather briefcase. I had league tables, so when I discovered Shostakovich he came in at number eight and pushed Nielsen down to nine. And I would listen to Radio 3, sometimes for 16 or 17 hours a day, and would underline everything I'd heard in the Radio Times. I should add that I also liked football, but I do find it a bit depressing when I come across composers now who don't want to listen to absolutely everything." He says his parents thought he was unusual, but encouraged him. "School was very unsupportive. I was hopeless at everything apart from music and only got two O-levels.

I then only got a B in my music A-level because one of the questions about the Berg violin concerto was so ridiculous I said so in my answer. Although I wasn't a confident kid, I was very confident about music and actually used to correct one teacher's pronunciation of composers names. No wonder they hated me." At age 14 Turnage was studying at the junior section of the Royal College of Music. Soon after, he came into the orbit of the composer and conductor Oliver Knussen , who was a tutor. "By the time I got to meet Ollie, my listening habits had become quite advanced and I had quite sophisticated taste for someone so young. But the music I was composing was very traditional. There was no correlation between what I was listening to and what I was writing. Ollie helped to change that." Not only did Turnage begin to write in a more contemporary idiom, he also began to incorporate his interest in jazz as well as soul music, "which was a very Essex thing. I actually objected to white rock music and was quite snooty about long guitar solos.

And I sort of missed out on punk." Instead he played keyboard in a jazz funk band, "with one finger while looking a bit pissed off. Presumably it was a slight rebellion thing against the Royal College, but I was conscious of having a broader taste than most music students and I did keep up the serious composing at the side of it." One of the first pieces he worked on with Knussen, Night Dances (1981), featured a middle movement that was "sort of a tribute to Miles Davis. I'm still fond of it but the jazz is not very well absorbed into the wider piece. I didn't actually know any professional jazz players then. And I certainly wasn't ready to play with people. I might have been able to fool people in Grays, but not people who really knew about jazz so I was a bit isolated and it took a while for me to absorb it a bit more naturally." While at college Turnage assumed that he would have to make his living writing commercial music. "I actually wrote to the BBC radiophonic workshop asking for a job when I was a teenager. I didn't really have expectations of writing concert music and certainly not to a write an opera.

As it turned out I haven't done any of that type of commercial work, but it wasn't really until after Greek that I realised I was going to get the opportunity to do the things I really wanted." The genesis of Greek came in 1983 when Turnage won a scholarship to study with Gunther Schuller and Hans Werner Henze at Tanglewood in America. "I'd always had a problem with classical music being a minority thing. But while I was uncomfortable with only a certain amount of people from a certain class listening to this music, I didn't become political about it until I met Henze. Age 16 I was buying the Daily Telegraph – again very Essex – but in my early 20s I became very anti-Thatcher and anti-Conservative which was reflected in Greek." Turnage's adaptation of Stephen Berkoff's updated, East End version of Oedipus the King was premiered in Munich in 1988. The following year Turnage became an associate composer with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and collaborated on a series of acclaimed works with Rattle.

When Rattle was appointed chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in 2002, one of the first pieces he performed was Turnage's Blood on the Floor, a suite of music that includes sections titled "Needles", "Junior Addict" and "Elegy For Andy", which memorialised his late brother. He has often returned to the elegy form, most recently for Fausto Moroni, Henze's partner, to whom he dedicated the middle section of Twisted Blues with Twisted Ballad. "I do have a mortgage and I am quite heavily commissioned. But you have a sort of freedom when something happens in your life. So there are elegies and there are birthdays. Both can be emotional but I feel it is a positive response to someone you cared for." In 1995 Turnage became attached to ENO where The Silver Tassie won the 2000 Olivier and South Bank Show awards. Since then he has been looking for another opera idea.

"There are so many bad ideas and hardly any good ones." He says the response within the Royal Opera House to Anna Nicole was positive, but with some nervousness about the baggage Thomas brings from Jerry Springer and the fact that the piece deals with people who are still alive. "We've had no contact from anyone so far, but who knows – there might even be another opera in it." Having read most of the many books about Smith he says there are "so many conflicting versions of her story and so we play with that idea of what is the truth of a life. The whole construct of celebrity makes it even more difficult to pin down. What's obvious is that she had a pretty terrible life, in that she was abused as a kid and lots of other things. That she became this world-famous model from that background is remarkable in itself." He says his overriding emotion is sadness. "I didn't want to diss her, more celebrate her; the piece is pretty much a comedy until about the last quarter, but ultimately it is comic-horror, as opposed to tragedy.

What happened to her was horrific, particularly at the end, and at the first read-through Richard Jones quite correctly said that this is a political piece, as are many of the things I've done. It's about the society she came from and the society she lived in. I'm certain that if she'd come from a different strata of society, people would have treated her differently. And that does strike a nerve. "The story of a 19th-century courtesan is accepted as grist to the mill of opera composers. But because she died only in 2007 and is meant to be trailer-trash, it makes people uncomfortable. If it had been about a person who had essentially been approved of, then it would have been fine. But why is she of less value or less suitable as a subject than, say, Marilyn Monroe?

We are still dealing with a fascinating human being whose life, however weirdly, reflected the times we all live in." Anna Nicole Smith: the opera | Reuters.com Feb 18, 2011 | 02:05 Anna Nicole Smith: the opera Feb 18 - Anna Nicole opera premieres in London, but the father of the former Playboy model's only surviving child is not impressed. TRANSCRIPT + EDIT CONTAINS CONVERTED 4:3 MATERIAL The troubled life and times of late Hollywood starlet Anna Nicole Smith are been chronicled in a new opera. Smith died in 2007, aged 39, of an accidental prescription drug overdose while embroiled in a legal battle over the will of her late husband, billionaire oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall who was 63 years her senior when they married. London's Royal Opera House hosts the production simply titled "Anna Nicole" with Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek playing the voluptuous blonde.

On opening night composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and librettist Richard Thomas said that the opera, advertised as a 'celebrity story of our times that includes extreme language, drug abuse and sexual content' is not trashy and neither was Smith. SOUNDBITE Mark-Anthony Turnage, composer, saying (English): "We don't think of it as trashy. Maybe I'm trashy, but we don't think of her like that. It's quite a cruel word to use. There's something quite special about her really. I think we've fallen in love with her after working on the show." But "trashy and tabloidy" is exactly how Larry Birkhead, the father of Smith's four year old daughter, says it looks to him. Angry that producers never contacted him or Smith's estate about the show, Birkhead said lawyers were looking into whether legal action could be taken against the production. Richard Thomas is no stranger to controversy: his musical "Jerry Springer: The Opera" sparked a record number of complaints when it aired on UK television in 2005. But the librettist said his latest opera treats the subject matter with the sensitivity it deserves.

SOUNDBITE Richard Thomas, librettist, (English) "It's a very bleak tale but it's also beautifully comedic. There's an absurdity about her life that's very transcendental and beautiful and the opera is actually dedicated to her." The opera runs in London for just six sold out performances. Doug MacLaurin, Reuters. Anna Nicole, the opera, a ‘classic American tale’ | Toronto Star Music Anna Nicole, the opera, a ‘classic American tale’ A new opera of about the life and times of the former Playboy model will feature ‘scandal, legal battles and early death,’ says the Royal Opera House. The life and times of Anna Nicole Smith is the subject of a new opera debuting next year. (MARK J. TERRILL / AP FILE PHOTO) By Lesley Ciarula TaylorStaff Reporter Thu., March 11, 2010 Anna Nicole, the new opera about the Playboy centrefold turned celebrity widow debuting next year, very much fits in with the spirit of the high culture Royal Opera House, a spokeswoman says. Created by the man who spawned Jerry Springer: The Opera, Anna Nicole will make its world premiere in February at the Covent Garden stage in London.

“It’s very much in the modern zeitgeist and fits into our season of women who have been victims or died unfortunately. Women who were quite iconic in their particular era,” opera house spokeswoman Rita Grudzien told the Star Thursday. The story of the Texas-born fried chicken waitress who married an 89-year-old oil tycoon shares the season with Madama Butterfly (an exploited, abandoned bride who murders herself), Tosca (a madly jealous singer who murders her would-be rapist then kills herself after her lover is executed) and Cosi Fan Tutte (described by Star critic Peter Goddard as the Mozart version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”). “Adult themes, strong language and sexually explicit content are part of this exciting work,” say the program notes on Anna Nicole. “Scandal, legal battles and early death – this is the real-life story.” The caveat about language comes because Anna Nicole will be sung in English and depict the life of someone who was Playmate of the Year in 1993, said opera house director of communications Christopher Millard. “We want to let people know,” he said. “Her life involved being a centrefold model.

It involves bad language.” Writer Richard Thomas, who penned Jerry Springer, and British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, created the work that will star Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek in the title role. A big-voiced star who made ends meets early in her career as a singing waitress in Amsterdam, Westbroek is best known for her performances of Lady MacBeth, another woman with bad taste in men. “It’s not going to be a horrible, sleazy evening,” Elaine Padmore, Covent Garden’s director of opera, told the Guardian when the project was first announced one year ago. “It’s going to be witty, clever, thoughtful and sad. “It’s not just a documentary about her, but a parable about celebrity. It’s a very sad story, as was Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West.” Nicole Smith died at age 39 of an accidental drug overdose in a Florida casino hotel room in February 2007, after a highly publicized legal war with his children over the will of her husband J. Howard Marshall. He had died 13 months after their marriage. Her 20-year-old son had died just months before Nicole Smith’s death.

After she died, her burial and custody of her daughter provoked new court battles. In a 2008 interview with Whatsonstage.com, Thomas said, “Anna Nicole Smith’s tragic life story is a classic American tale about celebrity and the price you pay for trying to escape your roots – it’s intrinsically operatic! People tell me I should write about something ‘worthy.’ So I’m going to write an opera about Mother Teresa? Never. It’s inverted snobbery. I like to choose subjects that seem trashy.” The operas of Mark-Anthony Turnage — News — Royal Opera House British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage © Philip Gatward British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage was initially wary of opera. In spite of an evident gift for evoking vivid drama in his music – as demonstrated in his 1983 early work Lament for a Hanging Man – he had been put off the genre by concerns that many operatic subjects seemed distant from modern life. However, Hans Werne Henze encouraged him to try his hand and Turnage’s first foray into opera, Greek, was given a triumphant premiere at the 1988 Munich Biennale .

Unafraid to take risks and eager to engage with the reality of modern life, the composer quickly established an international reputation as a daring and much-admired ‘operatic enfant terrible’ (as dubbed by the Telegraph ). The libretto for Greek was adapted by Turnage and Jonathan Moore from a play by Steven Berkoff, itself a contemporary reworking of the Oedipus myth . Setting the story in 1980s East London, the composer draws on the power of ancient myth in a modern setting to examine racism, greed, AIDS and unemployment. The score incorporates an audacious blend of musical influences – from Benjamin Britten to Turnage’s hero Miles Davis , and even football chants. All evoke the urban angst of Berkoff’s drama and cut through with moments of lyrical tenderness. In the years following Greek Turnage spent time concentrating on his orchestral output and developing his unique musical language, producing works such as his highly acclaimed Blood on the Floor , which saw its first complete performance in 1996.

The 50th anniversary of the Aldeburgh festival in 1997 saw the premieres of his next compositions for the stage: Twice Through the Heart , a dramatic scena for mezzo-soprano; and The Country of the Blind, a chamber opera. Between them, these hard-hitting works include moments of wonderful expression – such as the beautiful love duet in The Country of the Blind – as well as exhibiting Turnage’s now signature synthesis of jazz with elements of modernism, and his propulsive rhythmic energy. Commissioned by English National Opera , The Silver Tassie premiered in 2000 and confirmed Turnage's mastery of the genre. Amanda Holden's libretto is based on a play by Sean O’Casey and explores the impact of World War I on a Dublin family. The opera's four acts follow the form of a traditional symphony, where the composer draws together the powerfully acerbic qualities of Greek with the expressivity of his intervening work. Turnage also infuses the opera with traditional melodies and memorable motifs, and gives each character a subtle and developed musical identity. Anna Nicole is Turnage’s boldest opera to date.

Commissioned by The Royal Opera and first performed in 2011, its portrayal of the dramatic life and death of the Playboy model and celebrity Anna Nicole Smith generated a huge media buzz even before the opening night. In a consciously lighter vein than Turnage’s earlier operas, the work’s fabulously vulgar libretto by Jerry Springer: The Opera co-creator Richard Thomas is paired with a typically eclectic score. With trademark tinges of jazz and blues skillfully combined with influences from a plethora of 20th-century masters (amongst them Stravinsky and Janáček), this ‘musically rich, audacious and inexplicably poignant work’ has become a classic of our time. Anna Nicole: the opera | Music | The Guardian The Guardian The Observer Anna Nicole: the opera Anna Nicole Smith was the waitress who became a Playboy pin-up and billionaire's wife, before dying penniless at 39, the bloated laughing stock of reality TV. Her life was a soap opera. And now composer Mark-Anthony Turnage has turned it into a real one Anna Nicole Smith celebrating Christmas with her billionaire husband J Howard Marshall in 1994.

Photograph: Sipa Press/SIPA Saturday 1 January 2011 19.04 EST First published on Saturday 1 January 2011 19.04 EST Share on Messenger Close Imagine the love-goddess Aphrodite fitted with silicone-swollen boobs, bloated by junk food, slowed down by pills and befogged by booze: that was Anna Nicole Smith, who is soon to wiggle, waddle and stagger across the stage of the Royal Opera House. Commissioning a new opera, Tony Hall, chief executive of the ROH, asked the composer Mark-Anthony Turnage to choose a contemporary subject, not some remote, ancestral myth. In the event, Turnage's Anna Nicole supplies both at once. The heroine is our contemporary, or would be if she were still alive; but she was also a mythical being – an artificial deity, the superhuman embodiment of our faults and follies, invented and marketed as an object of desire. Anna Nicole's life beggared the most lurid fiction. She began as Vickie Lynn Hogan, a peroxide-blond waitress from the dusty Texas backblocks.

Having changed her name to something classier, she was chosen in 1992 as one of Hugh Hefner's pin-ups and draped across a Playboy centrefold. In 1994 she married the oil billionaire J Howard Marshall II, who had tottered into the so-called "titty bar" where she worked as a lap dancer. She was 26, he was 89, incontinent and mentally incompetent. They never lived together, but they did go shopping a lot: she plied him with Valium as she wheeled him round jewellery stores and scooped up booty. Fed on scraps of raw bacon and sometimes left out in the rain, in 1995 the old man obligingly made her a widow. She signalled her availability by attending his funeral in a backless white wedding dress, with a yapping lapdog tucked under her arm. When Marshall's family disputed her right to inherit his estate, Anna Nicole took her claim to the US supreme court, which is still considering the case. She was the perfect celebrity, sustained by effrontery and unblessed by talent.

Her appearance in one of the Naked Gun sequels earned her an award as worst new star (with OJ Simpson taking an equivalent honour as worst supporting actor). She can be glimpsed for a few seconds in the Coen brothers' Hudsucker Proxy, playing one of Tim Robbins's tarty trophies. She preens in a leopard-skin outfit, and when asked a question emits not a word but a noise: "Miaow!" Weight gain and botched plastic surgery put a stop to her modelling contracts; in 2002 a reality TV show chronicling her antics gave her a new career as a raucous self-publicist and made her a national laughing stock. In 2006 her daughter Dannielynn was born on television by caesarean section. A tag team of occasional lovers – including Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt, a retired masseur currently married to Zsa Zsa Gabor – all claimed to be the baby's father, and eagerly volunteered to look after the Marshall inheritance. Paternity was eventually assigned by the courts to a paparazzi photographer called Larry Birkhead, who now has custody of the child.

Days after Dannielynn's birth, Anna Nicole's 20-year-old son Daniel, the product of a teenage marriage, died from an overdose while visiting his mother and half-sister in the maternity ward. Howard K Stern, Anna Nicole's lawyer, agent and purported lover, denied feeding Daniel drugs and flushing the leftovers down the lavatory. Stern then exchanged vows with Anna Nicole on a yacht in the Bahamas, after which they ate a wedding breakfast shipped in from the American mainland by Kentucky Fried Chicken. In 2007 Anna Nicole herself, aged only 39, died in a garishly opulent suite at the Hard Rock hotel and casino in Florida, brimming with methadone and prescription medicines supplied by compliant doctors. Last summer Stern was found guilty of contributing to her death by acting as an unofficial pharmacist, and is due to be sentenced on Thursday in California. Anna Nicole was a woman of primal hungers. "Hurry up, I'm starving!" she orders the obsequious Stern in her reality show.

At a casino buffet in Las Vegas, he heaps a plate for her as she yells across the room; under his breath he mutters: "She's not gonna want salad." Burgers, sausages, waffles, barbecued ribs, processed cheese and whipped cream chugged into Anna Nicole, to be later expelled by laxatives or extracted by liposuction. Between blow-outs she snacked on gherkins that looked like warty green penises. "I'm proud to swallow," she liked to brag (though she was not referring to food). Even her poodle Sugar Pie was named after a sweet treat, as if in an emergency the dog might be edible. She also had an appetite for dollars, which was facilitated by her puzzlement about the decimal point: she once told a court she had "trouble with zeroes", and thought that $2,500 was only $25.00. Above all she craved fame, which she attained by undressing. Eating and spending were her occupations, but exposure was her business. Long before Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, Anna Nicole's amplified boobs regularly popped out from under cover for the cameras.

Whenever that happened she would shimmy, squeal and ask the ogling crowd: "Do you like my body?" The response was always a feral roar of lust. Like one of the sacred prostitutes who pleasured worshippers in the temples of Babylon, she belonged to whoever fantasised about her. Although Elaine Padmore, director of opera at the ROH, promises that Turnage's Anna Nicole will not be "tawdry", a brochure uses inflammatory red letters to warn of "extreme language, drug abuse and sexual content"; the libretto, after all, is by Richard Thomas, co-author of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which in its subtitle equates opera with exhibitionism. Thomas's expletives may be new, but nothing else should startle genteel music-lovers. Opera already has plenty of hoydens and harlots like Anna Nicole Smith . The heroines of Verdi's La traviata, Puccini's Manon Lescaut and Massenet's Thaïs are courtesans, and Strauss's Salome performs a striptease without needing the pole around which Anna Nicole's legs twined themselves when she cavorted at the club in Houston.

In opera, however, these wantons all finish redeemed. Violetta the fallen woman is raised up by the sacrifice she makes, and the reformed Thaïs slumps at the foot of the cross. Anna Nicole did not end in a state of grace. When her son died, she hysterically entreated Jesus to take her instead, then recovered in time to sell the last photographs of him alive; at his funeral, she climbed into his open coffin. A few months later, she died in a puddle of vomit, and millions peeked at snapshots of her messy exit on the internet. Nowadays any celebrity who misbehaves is likely to be called a diva, but Anna Nicole will soon have a legitimate right to the name: she is to be played at Covent Garden by the Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, acclaimed everywhere for her impassioned performances in Wagner and Strauss, Verdi and Puccini. Ever since receiving Turnage's score, Westbroek has been puzzling over the motives of the woman whose skin she will have to inhabit. "Why would you do that to yourself? Where does that come from?" she wondered in a recent interview.

She has decided that Anna Nicole was driven, like Salome, by an erotic compulsion that compelled her to destroy herself: "I find her fascinating and tragic because she really went for death." In opera, music harmonises discords and helps to pardon moral faults, but the real Anna Nicole was loud, unlyrical and intermittently obscene. In one of her films, Skyscraper, a terrorist in black leather pants bends her over to be sodomised. She pulls a knife, stabs him in the groin, then aims a gun at him. "You wanna fuck me? Then fuck this!" she snarls, blowing his head off. In her last film, a sci-fi farrago called Illegal Aliens, her medicated stupor made it impossible for her to memorise dialogue, so instead she burps, hiccups and noisily farts. If she speaks, it is to give bulletins about her bodily needs. "My stomach hurts," she whines. "Why's my poopyslot sore?" she asks after a mind-controlling suppository is inserted.

Later she urgently announces "I gotta pee!" In her reality show she cheats in an eating contest, and is overheard in the lavatory spewing up bucketloads of pizza and ravioli. Caught out by Stern, she bawls at him in the street: "I just went in there and took a shit, OK?" Elsewhere she suddenly remembers that she didn't masturbate that morning, and wanders off to find her vibrator; the cameras that follow her everywhere retire as the knobbly length of latex powers up. By contrast with Anna Nicole, Katie Price and Kerry Katona look and sound like nuns in a closed order. Anna Nicole was woozily ignorant about the world she lived in, and when first flown from Texas to Los Angeles by Playboy was astonished to find that California was not, as she believed, on the east coast. Geopolitical crises passed her by. Stern once tried to persuade her to take up the Israeli cause, and told her about the activities of Arab suicide bombers. "Wow," she marvelled, "why would they do that?

Ain't it kinda painful?" She then chirpily added: "I don't know nothin' 'bout nothin." She may not have understood her times, but she typified them all the same. The Reagan era legitimised greed; Anna Nicole's grossness was a logical consequence of this shift in public morality. Bill Clinton found greasy food and easy women irresistible, and right-wingers argued that he and Anna Nicole – both spawned by dysfunctional families from the southern underclass – were interchangeable. In 2006 the administration of George W Bush accepted responsibility for Anna Nicole by sending its solicitor general to file a brief for her during her dispute with the Texas probate courts over the Marshall millions. She instinctively knew how the system worked: the law, back in those heady days, was a means of enrichment and an extension of showbiz. She became the symbol of a binge that ended soon after she died, when the American economy imploded. She appeared to be rich, though she lived off hand-outs and never paid bills. She was overbearing and uproarious, but her energy had toxic sources. She began the day with an injection of vitamin B12, immunoglobins and human growth hormone.

These were her "longevity drugs", though they were part of what shortened her life rather than prolonging it. Along with the usual female accoutrements, her handbag contained enough uppers and downers to concuss and then resuscitate an elephant. A tabloid took an inventory of the drugs she carried round with her, listing Aldactazide, Decadron, Demerol, Imipramine, methocarbamol, Prilosec, Propulsid, Seldane, Synthroid, temazepam, Vicodin and Xanax. She washed these down with tequila, and kept her engine revved with snorts of cocaine. Her dog was on Prozac, with a psychotherapist on standby to deal with its whimpering anxiety. Anna Nicole's narcissism matched the glutted, self-satisfied mood of America in the 1990s. Skyscraper contains a sex scene in which her lover, conscientiously doing his duty behind her as she bestraddles the bed, seems irrelevant to the proceedings. The camera concentrates on her famous breasts, which look like a pair of tanned twin Zeppelins.

Anna Nicole herself seems to be in awe of them as she fingers a nipple and palpates the squashy mounds; the man is at best a substitute for her vibrator. Like America with its trickle-down theory of affluence, she allowed the rest of the world to partake of her bounty, so long as it remained appropriately grateful for the favour. Throwing a Christmas party in the reality show, she has an ice sculpture moulded from her torso and sets it up as a punchbowl; arriving guests are required to kneel before her hollowed-out bosom and slurp up the contents. But those boobs were as much a burden as America's imperial role. Anna Nicole referred to them as transplants not implants, as if they had been grafted on; they caused her crippling back problems, and in 1994 a saline sac ruptured, leaked and shrivelled, leaving her with an asymmetrical chest. "This is my life, my whole world!" she screamed as she summoned the surgeon. "Everything I have is because of my breasts!" No wonder she deflated. Like all wannabes, she suffered from mythomania, and fancied she had relatives in heaven.

Hence her insistence that she was the farmed-out child of Marilyn Monroe (who inconveniently died five years before Anna Nicole was born). Her chosen consort also belonged in the upper air. In one episode of her reality show, she slavers over Superman, whom she finds on a mural at a theme park. Coaxed by Stern, she gobbles the cartoon figure's crotch and licks his aerodynamic anus. Mortal men could not measure up. Stern is relentlessly mocked, called a "pussy boy" when he won't go swimming, and asked "Is your dick hard yet?" as some Las Vegas chorines grind in his face. In another episode, Anna Nicole dismisses a nerdy millionaire who arrives to take her out for dinner. "How's his butt?" she asks one of the camera crew that trails her. "Oh yuk, it's flat!" At moments like this she resembles a gay man in a female fat suit. Skyscraper, in which she plays a helicopter pilot who clutches her chopper's joystick with scarlet talons as she ferries passengers between high-rise landing pads in Los Angeles, gives her a properly divine job of salvation to do.

Like Schwarzenegger or Stallone with mammaries not muscles, she thwarts a gang of terrorists in black leather pants who have captured one of the city's office towers. In Illegal Aliens she belongs to a trio of extraterrestrial kickboxers who descend to Earth, wriggle into skimpy shorts and strained bras, then set about recapturing a gizmo called a mega-gravitron, that has tugged the moon out of the sky and put it on a collision course with Earth. Someone asks one of Anna Nicole's nubile colleagues what the nonsensical plot is all about. "We're trying to save the world, dickhead!" snaps the babe from outer space. Anna Nicole, walking unsteadily and slurring her speech, is excused on medical grounds from taking part in the action. Her contribution is to disappear: this time she magically morphs into a helicopter, and the other women ride in her as they go about the work of restoring cosmic order. Her craziest act of self-consecration occurred after the death of her son, when she arranged herself into a tableau of divine anguish.

Daniel Smith died while she and Stern were asleep in the same hospital room; the bereaved mother had Stern photograph her clasping Daniel's stiff body. It was a pietà styled for the tabloids, with a blearily voluptuous and unvirginal Mary cradling a Christ who was killed, according to the autopsy, by a mixture of methadone and antidepressants. Did disasters like this make Anna Nicole tragic, as Eva-Maria Westbroek believes? Probably not, since she was so quick to capitalise on her misfortunes, and so unwilling to accept responsibility for them. Her mode was melodrama, and she had an operatic tendency to exaggerate. "Kill me, kill me please, get me out of my misery!" she begs in the reality show, before banging her head against the wall and collapsing. What provoked this aria was not remorse or a tormented conscience; a mirror had given her a confidential glimpse of her oversized bum in a mirror and, like every other self-advertising neurotic on reality TV, she was acting up for the cameras.

Her agony may have been mere histrionics, but she was certainly a victim – of her own false values, and also of a society whose ethics she challenged and whose hypocrisy she exposed. In 1994 she appeared on the cover of New York magazine wearing cowboy boots and stuffing herself with cheesy crisps from a bag held open between her spread legs; the image illustrated a scornful analysis of America by the writer Tad Friend as a "White Trash Nation", overrun by rednecks like Beavis and Butt-Head and Lorena Bobbitt (the harridan who chopped off her cheating husband's penis) and of course Clinton and his bimbos. Friend's article warned against the "guilt-free freedom" of these monsters, who threatened a culture that traditionally valued self-denial and regarded fame as a reward for achievement, not a by-product of vacuous notoriety. Sexually, Anna Nicole was equally alarming, less a wet dream than a castrating nightmare. Her pin-up pictures catered to a voyeurism that was edged with fear and envenomed by contempt. Hence the barrage of misogynistic abuse, as lethal as gunfire, against which she battles in Skyscraper.

"Let's off this bitch!" growls one of the terrorists. "Time to die, you blond bitch!" screeches another. A third coldly sneers: "You fuckin' whore!" One way of neutralising her was to treat her as a mother not a mistress, and hangers-on habitually called her "Momma". She allayed male terrors by pretending to be infantile: she conversed in baby talk, and addressed the doddering, dribbling J Howard Marshall as "Paw-paw". Despairing of men or despising them, Anna Nicole turned to other women for sexual comfort. Gossips reported on romps with girlfriends in a seething jacuzzi, and in the reality show she seems happiest when comparing implants with some Las Vegas dancers who are naked except for their sequins. The Royal Opera is expecting and probably counting on a fuss, but no one should dispute Turnage's choice of subject. The gaudily uninhibited Anna Nicole belongs in opera, where her many predecessors include the man-killing heroine of Alban Berg's Lulu.

At one point in Lulu's career, the composer who is her latest conquest fondles her body and applies musical markings to its various sectors: her ankles, he says, should be played grazioso, her knees misterioso, her breasts cantabile, while a steady rhythmical andante conducts love towards its targeted climax. I can't wait to hear how Turnage has composed the symphonic physique of Anna Nicole Smith.

Anna Nicole premieres at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 on 17 Feb and runs until 4 March BAM | Anna Nicole Anna Nicole Video Loads Here (javascript rquired) Sep 17Sep 28, 2013 FULL PRICE TICKETS: $25—235 F St 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 1 2 3 4 5 Tuesday September 17, 2013 BAM and New York City Opera present Anna Nicole Directed by Richard Jones Conducted by Steven Sloane Anna Nicole was commissioned by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London and premiered there in February 2011 “A production that should not be missed.” —The New York Times In a brilliant marriage of lowbrow bawdiness and highbrow operatic craft, British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and

 librettist Richard Thomas (Jerry Springer: The Opera) immortalize the tumultuous life of Anna Nicole Smith—stripper, playmate, and formidable tabloid queen.

Looking to each paparazzi-plagued chapter of the star’s story—the bombshell centerfold, the devastated mother, the unlikely wife of an 89-year-old billionaire—Anna Nicole captures a woman caught between greed and exploitation. Turnage’s vibrant, eclectic score (performed by the New York City Opera orchestra and chorus) and Thomas’ razor-sharp libretto drive this operatic portrait, at once comic and tragic, of modern celebrity and one woman’s warped pursuit of the American dream. Scenic design by Miriam Buether Costume design by Nicky Gillibrand Lighting design by Mimi Jordan Sherin & D.M. Wood Choreography by Aletta Collins Mark-Anthony Turnage, Richard Thomas, and Antonio Pappano on Anna Nicole - YouTube Mark-Anthony Turnage, Richard Thomas, and Antonio Pappano on Anna Nicole Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. The interactive transcript could not be loaded. Loading... Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later.

Published on Sep 25, 2014 Presenter and former Royal Opera Chorus member Dominic Peckham speaks with librettist Richard Thomas, composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, and conductor and Music Director of The Royal Opera Antonio Pappano, about the reaction to their smash hit opera Anna Nicole. A small-town waitress decides to become a stripper, weds an octogenarian billionaire and becomes a Playboy model and celebrity. But as her fame grows, so does the exploitative behaviour of those close to her, the intrusiveness of the media and her own dependence on drink and pills. The flamboyant life and tragic death of Anna Nicole Smith inspired Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera, commissioned by The Royal Opera and first performed in 2011. The razor-sharp libretto is by Richard Thomas, co-creator of Jerry Springer: the Opera. Richard Jones’s Olivier-nominated production mixes comedy and tragedy, and boldly confronts the nature of modern celebrity culture. The music fuses jazz, blues and music theatre with more traditional operatic language.

Highlights include Anna’s wedding scene, in which she declares her intention to live the ‘American Dream’; a rowdy party, complete with jazz trio; an Expressionist interlude showing the decline of Anna’s fortunes; the long, hopeless list of pills sung by Anna's son Daniel; and Anna’s poignant final lament sung over Daniel's dead body. Find out more at Category Anna Nicole Smith: The Opera - Channel 4 News Anna Nicole Smith: The Opera Source ITN Updated on 12 February 2009 The Royal Opera House is planning to stage an opera based on the tragic life of US glamour model Anna Nicole Smith. Mark-Anthony Turnage is writing the story which will be staged in London's Covent Garden in 2011. Richard Thomas, whose credits include the controversial Jerry Springer: The Opera, will provide the libretto. Director of opera Elaine Padmore said the work was not just a documentary about Smith, but a parable about celebrity - and the former Playmate of the Year certainly provides good subject matter. Early on in her life, at the age of 17, she married an elderly oil billionaire J Howard Marshall, who was more than 60 years her senior.

She went on to become a successful glamour model, appearing in numerous editions of Playboy magazine, and even appeared in some some films, including Naked Gun 33â ": The Final Insult. But it all went wrong in February 2007, when Nicole Smith, 39, was found unresponsive in her hotel room in Hollywood, Florida, and was later pronounced dead. Her death came just five months after that of her 20-year-old son, Daniel. The work is in its early stages, but Ms Padmore added: "It is not going to be tawdry, it is going to be witty, clever, thoughtful and sad. In broad outline, it will tell the story of her life, the people who influenced her, her progress... "Clearly the story is about a woman who met an ancient gentleman in a wheelchair, but it's not going to be a straight narrative; choices have been made about significant moments, selecting which incidents in her life are to be built up." She said it was a very sad story - "a larger-than-life American story, it was Puccini's Girl of the Golden West. It will be a slice of our times - of America in the pre-Obama days".

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Question: Which former Playboy model was the subject of an opera by Mark-Anthony Turnage?
Answer: Anna Nicole Smith