Poul Ruders: The American nightmare - now set to music

Composing an opera in one language is hard enough. Why would any sane composer write one in two languages simultaneously? Yet that is the problem that the Danish composer Poul Ruders set himself when he wrote his opera The Handmaid's Tale, derived from Margaret Atwood's novel of the same name.

When the Royal Danish Opera commissioned the piece, Ruders already knew that the novel was the only subject he would consider. No doubt keeping a prudent eye on the possibility of other stagings, he wanted it to be sung in English. Atwood wrote her novel in English; his librettist, Paul Bentley, was English; neither spoke Danish. And in any case, the composer suggests, "Danish is a terrible language to sing. It sounds like shit." But as this was to be the first new opera seen at the Royal Danish Opera in 30 years, the company had an understandable investment in it being sung in Danish. "This was our 'national stage' and there was no way round it," Ruders concedes. "I had to take it or leave it."

He didn't abandon the idea of an English-language opera; instead he wrote it in English, and in Danish: "I did the Danish translation myself, so I was composing in two languages at the same time. That was gruelling to begin with, but fun once I got the hang of it. The main problem was that Danish words have so many more syllables than the English equivalent. The word 'love' is not uncommon in opera, and it's certainly not uncommon in Margaret Atwood's novel. But what is a monosyllable in English has three syllables in Danish: 'kærlighed'. And of course, a note that sits nicely on a certain vowel in English won't necessarily fall on the same vowel in Danish. In the end, though, I found a way through."

In an unusual compromise, the Royal Danish Opera decided that for the Copenhagen premiere in 2000, surtitles above the stage would provide Paul Bentley's original English text. Surtitles usually translate the original text of an opera into the language of the audience, not the other way round, but at least one member of the first night crowd would have been grateful for the service: Margaret Atwood. As Ruders recalls, "She was touched, although it must have been strange to see her characters come to operatic life."

No doubt Atwood was gratified that the novel's subject still carried weight 15 years after she wrote it. The Handmaid's Tale is set some time in the 21st century, when the United States has become the Christian fundamentalist state of Gilead. Environmental disaster has inflicted havoc on women's fertility, with the result that the ability to bear children has become a rigidly policed activity, imposed on those "Handmaids" still able to conceive. The novel recounts one Handmaid's account of her experiences, and of her memories of the Time Before: before, that is, "the Bible Belt garrotted America", as Paul Bentley's synopsis for the opera puts it.

The Handmaid's Tale continues to accumulate resonances, and the opera hardly less so, not least as we watch a religiously-driven, if not quite fundamentalist US government attempting to impose Pax Americana on Iraq. Yet the novel's political agenda is not high on the list of qualities that attracted Ruders: "The novel is an interior monologue, cool and detached, and quite unoperatic in that sense, but it has all the obvious operatic issues lined up: not only love, betrayal, hope, violence and sex, but also huge processions and public executions. What convinced me in the end was the overall feeling of heartbreaking tenderness."

It isn't that the opera avoids the political, but in Ruders' view, "Politics and opera are not the best bedfellows. They can become frightfully didactic and boring." In order to make the story operatic, he had to locate those qualities that make good opera. Only then would the novel's point survive the transfer to the opera house. Ruders is well aware that the world in which the opera takes place is not so distant: "We are in the time of Gilead now. What Atwood wrote about is actually happening. I wouldn't call the novel science fiction; I prefer to call it science vision, and it's frighteningly prophetic."

Ruders pays tribute to the skill of his librettist, Paul Bentley, in devising a dramatic text from the very different narrative form which Atwood used. The two have now collaborated on a second opera, based on Kafka's The Trial.

This week English National Opera brings The Handmaid's Tale to the London stage, in the production (by Phyllida Lloyd) seen in Copenhagen. At last composer and librettist will hear the opera in English, as they conceived it. Nothing guarantees success, but Ruders is confident that he, Bentley and Lloyd have done everything possible to make it work: "Opera is entertainment, and I'm not afraid of using the word. The audience has paid good money to sit down in an uncomfortable seat for three hours. It had damned well better be entertained, enriched, disturbed and, above all, engaged."

'The Handmaid's Tale': Coliseum, London WC2 (020 7632 8300) from Thursday to 2 May. Also on CD (Da Capo)