Sophie's Choice: Auschwitz and arias

William Styron's novel 'Sophie's Choice' caused controversy with its harrowing tale of Nazi persecution, says Tom Rosenthal. But is the same story a suitable subject for an opera?

On Saturday, a brand new opera is to open at Covent Garden, a rare event in itself but one made all the more notable by the fact that the production has seen extraordinary box-office demand for a work based on a story of cruelty and suffering experienced in a Nazi concentration camp.

The libretto for the opera has been adapted from William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice, published in 1979 (and made into a film starring Meryl Streep in 1982). Set in Brooklyn in 1947 it is narrated by Stingo, a 22-year-old virgin and struggling writer from Virginia. It describes in flashback his relationship with two doomed lovers, Nathan, a brilliant, paranoid-schizophrenic Jew, and Sophie, a Polish survivor of Auschwitz. In relentless detail it gradually uncovers Catholic Sophie's tormented past culminating in her need to choose which of her two small children will go to the gas chamber and which will be given the chance to live.

When the composer Nicholas Maw first suggested the idea of turning this into an opera, Covent Garden turned it down. But Maw's representatives did not give up and eventually Nicholas Payne, then Director of Opera, commissioned it (in association with Radio 3), no doubt encouraged by the fact that Maw's principal champion in Britain, Simon Rattle, wanted to conduct it and Trevor Nunn wanted to direct it.

It is no disrespect to Maw to say that one can sympathise with a Royal Opera House management which placed little faith in a major opera devoted to the Holocaust. Even Styron's novel had a contentious birth. I remember having dinner in New York in the late Seventies with a Jewish-American writer who had asked two fellow Jewish writers to join us. The main topic of conversation was the burgeoning and evermore embellished rumour that William Styron was – can you believe it? – writing a Holocaust novel. How could a gentile do such a thing? It was an outrage...

I knew, liked and admired Styron and suggested that without reading it, it was hard to see what the fuss was about. And anyway, had there not been a similar sense of outrage among black Americans when he had published his novel about a slave revolt in the Deep South (in which blacks killed quite a few whites), The Confessions of Nat Turner? And, once the dust had settled, hadn't Nat Turner been much admired?

When I spoke to Styron earlier this month, I asked whether, post-publication, the black Americans and the American Jews had finally regained their senses. He admitted that in the case of Sophie's Choice it had become calm again, although relatively recently a Jewish writer had accused him of corrupting history by choosing a gentile victim at Auschwitz and trying to supplant the Jewish Anne Frank with the Christian Sophie. But still it wasn't as bad as when, post Nat Turner, an entire book consisting solely of hostile essays about the novel and its creator was published.

I first read Sophie's Choice in manuscript when I tried, as head of Secker and Warburg, to become its publisher and did not re-read it until last month. Although nothing can ever re-create the initial revelation of what Sophie's choice was – to condemn one of her children to immediate death in Auschwitz in order to preserve the other in what passes for life in a Nazi concentration camp – to live through those 500 closely packed pages again is still a terrible journey for which two or three scenes of the movie can neither prepare or inoculate one. The book possesses a political, a historical, even a theological vision and subtlety that make one wonder how anyone can possibly make it work as an opera.

Even as a film it has, despite Streep's Sophie, a far more limited impact. Interestingly enough, when considering the issues of a change of medium for a great work of art, the movie was greeted by Variety with the words "a handsome doggedly faithful and astoundingly tedious adaptation of William Styron's bestseller." It's not as bad as that, but it certainly doesn't convince as the book does.

Styron caused a lot of fuss because he was one of the first major intellectual figures to write of the Holocaust in non-exclusively Jewish terms. Even to a Jew like myself – to my great shame – reading the novel was the first time I was forced to address deeply the enormity of Hitler's crime against other sections of humanity. Communists, gypsies, homosexuals, "mental defectives", "cripples", Slavs in general and Poles in particular were all grist to the Nazi mill. Which is why a concentration camp drama like Martin Sherman's Bent, about the treatment of homosexuals by the Nazis is so important.

In one of the best essays ever written about this topic, Gore Vidal described in his Pink Triangle and Yellow Star, published in The Nation in 1981, a meeting between himself and Christopher Isherwood with a young Jewish film producer in America. "After all," said Isherwood, "Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals." The young man was not impressed. "But Hitler killed six million Jews," he said sternly. "What are you?" asked Isherwood. "In real estate?"

The statistics game is not worth playing, being ultimately mere special pleading. But one of the cruxes of Styron's book is that it wasn't only the Jews who suffered. Perhaps the ultimate irony is not Sophie's choice but her defence of her father as a good man who loved the Jews, which eventually and inevitably segues into the revelation that this atrocious man, wiped out by the Nazis with utter contempt, was an anti-Semite so violent and crazed that even the Germans disregarded his paranoid utterances.

These are all subjects too subtle to explore fully on an operatic stage, just as the entire novel is too long to be set whole. Instead, Maw has compressed the basic skeleton of the book. Inevitably there are losses, such as Stingo's sexual disasters at the hands of the Jewish cock-teaser Leslie Lapidus and the prim Baptist Southern belle Mary Alice Grimball (a Dickensian pun surely). We don't get Stingo or Sophie on the beach or the abortive suicide pact in Connecticut but we get almost everything else that matters.

Maw takes certain minor liberties with Styron's complex time sequence but they all help to create the clarity necessary if his radical compression is to work on stage. Wherever possible he uses only Styron's words and, in the scene of Nathan's mad attack on Sophie, we must have a first in the setting to music of such words as anthrax, trichinosis, pellagra and encephalitis.

Maw first worked out a scenario to "organise in my own mind how I wanted this dramatically structured" and it was that document that he showed to Covent Garden, even before sending it to Styron. When Styron liked it Maw asked him to write the libretto. But Styron declined on the grounds that he could not again get himself involved "in that painful subject matter."

Maw, having had to omit so much, has actually added hardly anything. In the bar scene, when Nathan again goes berserk in an attack on Sophie, Maw has brought in the barman and some of the barflies. Maw says, quite rightly, that that "is a necessity of course. You have to have other people in the bar. You can't just have the principals sitting there alone." Other than that, and the essential earlier introduction of the Nazi Doctor (cribbed from the film for the sake of clarity), he is astonishingly faithful to the book.

There is one strange irony in book, film and opera, in that Nathan and Sophie use cyanide in their successful suicide pact, the method of choice for the Nazi hierarchy when they wished to avoid hanging at Nuremberg. When I asked Styron if this was a deliberate, conscious irony, he said that it wasn't. It was simply the logical method in that Nathan worked for a drug company and therefore had easy access, not only to the drugs that made him so crazy, but also the poisons that would kill them so expeditiously.

Ultimately, Styron's Sophie's Choice embodies his epigraph from André Malraux's Lazarus "... I seek that essential region of the soul where absolute evil confronts brotherhood." Until we hear the music we cannot know whether Maw has been able to express this. Styron will be present at the first night. When I asked him if, having been pleased with Maw's initial scenario, he approved the libretto, he said it was hard not to approve since it was so faithful to his own text.

With Rattle in the pit and Trevor Nunn, the inventive and sometimes defining director of such 20th-century classics as Porgy and Bess, Peter Grimes and Katya Kabanova doing the staging, it should be striking. Wildly passionate love when combined with raw historical tragedy has always been the stuff of great opera, so there's no reason to doubt that Maw may have written a modern classic.

'Sophie's Choice': Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020 7304 4000), Saturday to 21 December. The opera is broadcast live on Radio 3, 10 December, 6.55pm and on BBC4, 21 December at 7pm. 'Sophie's Choice' (£7.99) is published by Vintage