Opera - Michael Coveney on an opera that takes the notion of the humble piano tuner into fresh territory

Musical theatre and films with pianos in them have come a very long way since Julian Slade's cast of silly eccentrics danced around their magic keyboard in Salad Days and Dirk Bogarde pounded the ivories for England as a frilly-shirted Franz Liszt in Song Without End.

In recent years, we have seen a mute Holly Hunter dragging her precious piano (and daughter) to New Zealand in Jane Campion's The Piano; Isabelle Huppert giving erotic lessons in seduction in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher; and Adrien Brody plucking the heartstrings of his Nazi persecutor, and winning an Oscar, as the real-life musician Wladyslaw Szpilman in Roman Polanski's harrowing fable of occupied Warsaw, The Pianist.

Now we have The Piano Tuner, a new opera and surely, soon, a new film (Jude Law is already rumoured for the lead), based on a striking first novel by the young American biologist Daniel Mason. This is the fascinating story of Edgar Drake, a piano tuner in Victorian Lon-don, who travels to the imaginary jungle paradise of Mae Lwin, on the border of Burma and Siam, to repair the instrument of a surgeon major, Anthony Carroll, whose practice of music and medicine is attracting suspicion from the British army authorities.

If music can soothe the savage beast, and breast, then perhaps cultural intervention in the Shan states of Burma, where the historic British colonial operation is threatened by warring local princes, can make a difference. That is the book's premise, beautifully clouded in a composition which is part travelogue, part adventure story and part letter home, with various informative and entertaining diversions.

The composer of the opera, Nigel Osborne - who is Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University and has been involved with the anti-war group Action for Bosnia - is renowned for using music therapy and education as a means of treating severely traumatised children in Sarajevo and Mostar. His best-known work to date is The Electrification of the Soviet Union, with a libretto by Craig Raine, which was first performed at Glyndebourne in 1987. His music is characterised by a visceral, elemental quality that is both highly dramatic and often related to revolutionary and political themes.

He fell on Mason's novel with a mixture of excitement and relief. "The book not only sang back to me," he says, "it resonated at several levels. Not only because of my belief that music can be a power for good in the world, but also because of this propensity we have for accommodating an outside culture within us. The music I've written reflects Drake's journey as one of tuning and intonation from Europe into Burma. Piano tuners are the most humble and unpretentious of people, and also the most enlightened, as they really have to listen."

Following performances on 8 and 9 October at the Linbury Studio of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, The Piano Tuner can be seen in Sheffield on 18 October and subsequently in Oxford, Mold, Birmingham, Cardiff and Huddersfield. The production is by Music Theatre Wales and the libretto by Amanda Holden, who won an Olivier Award for her work on English National Opera's The Silver Tassie.

The structure of the opera follows that of the novel and allows for the ambiguity at the end, when Carroll's motives are thrown into question and Drake is left chasing the mirage of both his piano and the girl he has fallen for. If and when Jude Law makes the movie, these tantalising options will no doubt be levelled out into romantic conclusions.

In addition, Osborne has made hay with the crucial use of J S Bach's music in the book, disguising many of his fugues and harmonics in the score. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier was, after all, composed to illustrate a new method of tuning. The famous 48 preludes and fugues are the structural foundation of the book, and the opera follows this with the added bonus of a musical dimension that both harks back to Bach and fast-forwards to the post-Britten, post-Berg world of composition that Osborne has inhabited for 30 years.

Although, after reading music at Oxford, Osborne studied in Poland with those bleak masters Krzysztof Penderecki and Witold Lutoslawski, and then fetched up in the experimental world of Pierre Boulez workshops in Paris, his music strikes a basic, atavistic chord in a bloodless world of contemporary music. It is fascinating to see how he reverts in this score, finally, to the example of the greatest composer of all time. His opera is both a homage to Bach and a great leaping-off.

The make of piano in Mason's book is an Erard, the firm with factories in Paris and London that supplied Beethoven with his instrument. Osborne and Music Theatre Wales have an Erard of the precise time of Drake's journey in the orchestra, as well as a set of special Shan gongs that Os-borne found during his research in Burma. He did not follow Drake's exact route, but he travelled to his exact destination through Thailand. When the opera is over, Osborne plans to return the gongs to the fortune-teller in the village where he found them.

"The Shan are in a terrible state at the moment," he says. "Their villages are being burnt and their women raped. And the example for this depravity is what happened in former Yugoslavia." Osborne's anger about the war led to his political involvement on the ground: "We met so many brick walls that I eventually saw the impotence of politics. But the suffering, especially that of children, is so deep that I felt I had to do something."

Through his former contacts in the country - he first visited Yugoslavia in the late 1960s, before he went to Oxford - he started a programme of creative workshops first in Sarajevo and then in Mostar. "Sarajevo is on the mend, and has a revitalised artistic life in theatre and film. Mostar got badly hit twice, from both sides, in the war and is still a divided city with many deeply traumatised children." The music therapy centre in Mostar is now closing because of a lack of funds - a disaster that Osborne says borders on the obscene.

In the end, is Osborne more like Edgar Drake or Anthony Carroll, innocent musical do-gooder or cultural activist? "Drake is naive and I'm corrupted by experience. So I'm more like Anthony Carroll. There is always a danger of being less honest with yourself than you would want to be in these situations. And you don't get far with cultural activism without doing deals. That's all I can say, really."

The Piano Tuner is on tour until 24 November. For further information, phone 029 2049 8471 or visit www.musictheatrewales.org.uk

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