Stars in their eyes

John Rimmer's ambitious New Zealand opera about the astronomer Galileo opens this week. He tells HEATH LEES about its tortured birth.

John Rimmer has no doubts whatever about his new opera Galileo. "It's number one," he says confidently, "the best piece I've ever done." For a moment you wonder if you're being handed a line. Don't all New Zealand composers with a new opera tell journalists it's their best piece?

But then you realise hardly any New Zealand composers write operas, and besides, Rimmer's commitment to his work is so deep and infectious you soon begin to feel the brilliant but ill-starred renaissance astronomer Galileo is with you during your lunch-cum-interview.

A few weeks ago, Rimmer's Galileo - The Opera, which opens on Wednesday, transformed itself from a piece of serious musical theatre into the centre of a multi-media project the University of Auckland has taken on board and launched in the wake of its highly successful Knowledge Wave.

It plans lectures, debates and displays revolving around the life and work of the famous scientist and philosopher on the way the planets revolve around the sun - knowledge we owe to Galileo's work and to his courage to trust in intelligence as distinct from appearances.

Rimmer was attracted to Galileo's courage but also to his human qualities. "It goes back 10 years, when I was on leave in the United States. A stray remark from a composer colleague suggested I should write a work about a historical character. But who?

"Back here I stumbled on a newspaper article about astronomy which said Jupiter was then very close to the sun. With a reasonable pair of binoculars you could see it just as Galileo had seen it in 1610, with his newly invented telescope.

"The Galileo idea began to appeal. Then in 1992 there was an announcement by the Catholic Church that a 15-year-old commission of inquiry had recommended the official admission that Galileo had been right and the Church had been wrong.

"Just after that, Nasa released the news that its Jupiter-bound rocket had finally escaped Earth's gravitational field. The rocket was called Galileo. By now I was feeling that everything was pulling me with a gravity of its own towards Galileo himself."

Then Rimmer rediscovered what he already knew - that New Zealand composers have to fight long and hard to get the money to put an opera on stage. "You have to do all the legwork yourself. For Galileo, I took two years writing all the applications to arts bodies and possible sponsors.

"Everyone says they're very interested, but two or three months later they say no, so you start all over again. After the two years we had enough of a commitment to feel able to go ahead. Now we have to sell a thousand seats, so it's deep-breathing time and fingers crossed."

Once Galileo had been decided as a subject, Rimmer had to find a librettist. "I already knew Witi Ihimaera, who writes opera texts between novels, and we had lunch. For his digestion, I gave him all my written material on Galileo. Our collaboration was a rich one, and within months we had a finished libretto."

Rimmer's approach was highly organised. He keeps a notebook of the stages he went through to get the finished work. In 1995 he began a complete vocal outline from beginning to end. This gave him melodies he could attach to people and ideas and vary according to the events.

"There's a theme for Galileo which I change slightly to create parts of the other characters' music. So Galileo's theme acts like a central core - the sun around which the other characters revolve."

In 1998 Rimmer worked at the instrumental group. "It's a small ensemble of eight players, all seated on the stage, and costumed to suit. Each character has a solo sound. Galileo's is the horn, which is a heroic instrument, the Grand Duchess is signalled by the flute, the clarinet goes with the angel, the violin with the cardinal, and the cello with the Pope. Other ideas - heresy, conflict, discovery - are all framed in the colour of the music."

Later, the score was given its electronic parts, which Rimmer says are vital. "The electronic music occurs when the libretto mentions the music of the heavens. I use planetary tones, pure, lifeless sine-waves going round the auditorium at different speeds, but Witi Ihimaera's voice comes in, stretched out to a thousand times its own length, and it gives you an incredible surfing sound which I thought of as the ether of the universe."

In later passes through the universe of his music, Rimmer added the harmonic background, the instrumental colours for the opera's chief ideas, and what he calls "sound markers" for the drama's special events, such as Galileo's trial scene, where for the first time the acoustic and electronic worlds come together in a collision that Rimmer describes as "horrendous".

"Some of the music sounds quite traditional, too. I'm not afraid of the old tonalities coming through. You have to face that when your themes have only small numbers of notes. At the end of the day it's all in the way the notes turn out.

"For Galileo I was seized by a powerful generating idea, and it's flowed right through the creation of the work. Hopefully it'll flow on into the performances too."

* Galileo, Maidment Theatre, Wednesday until Saturday.