Your tiny hand is frozen. Are you preserving it for posterity?

Giorgio Battistelli pays tribute to the Italian operatic tradition with a new piece about the enbalming of Lenin. Nick Kimberley met him

It was the Italian composers who dreamed opera into existence at the beginning of the 17th century, and for 300 years, Forza Italia ruled the world's opera houses. Then with the death of Puccini in 1924, the well of lyricism that had sustained Italian opera ran dry; tradition alone remained. It was not only in Italy that opera was seen to have run its course. With few exceptions (Berg, Britten), European opera appeared unable to renew itself.

As an Italian composer, born in 1953, Giorgio Battistelli has a profound sense of the history that looms over any composer with operatic ambition: "When I was a student, we were more or less forbidden to talk about opera because it had such a weight of tradition behind it. In the immediate post-war period, the avant-garde was so obsessed with the material aspects of sound that it dismissed the emotional elements as mere rhetoric."

Undeterred, Battistelli sought new ways to reunite music, drama and emotion. The results have not always been operatic in any conventional sense, but they have moved and provoked just as opera's founding fathers intended. In Experimentum Mundi, premiered in Rome in 1981 and seen at London's Almeida Theatre in 1995, Battistelli's cast was also his orchestra, an ensemble, not of musicians and singers, but of artisans: a cobbler, a cooper, a pasta-maker. Their labours, amplified and conducted with ironic ceremony by Battistelli, constituted both the music and the drama. This unsentimental paean to a culture being slowly obliterated in the name of modernity has been Battistelli's most successful piece, with more than 200 performances worldwide.

Teorema, based on Pasolini's film of the same name and seen in London in 1993, was an enigmatic mixture of mime, dance and music theatre. In The Cenci, given its world premiere at the Almeida in 1995, there was again no singing, Battistelli's use of actors' voices was all but operatic.

Ian McDiarmid, the Almeida's joint artistic director, took the principal role in The Cenci. Now McDiarmid is about to leave that post, and as a farewell tribute, Battistelli has written a monodrama with music specifically for him. The Embalmer, based on a short story by Renzo Rosso, tells the tale of the embalmer charged with the duty of tending the corpse of Lenin. "It is a metaphor," says Battistelli, "not only for an ideology in the process of vanishing, just like Lenin's corpse, but also for a man, his life and his marriage, which, as we see, are also vanishing."

In the title role, McDiarmid will not be required to sing. "I adapted my writing to his particular vocal technique, just as composers in the past wrote for specific musicians." Next year Battistelli will unveil another version of The Embalmer, in which he gives the title role to a baritone.

London too will get two versions of The Embalmer: in a space near the auditorium, listeners will hear an electronically treated, simultaneous "aural shadow" of what is taking place in the theatre. "As the sound deconstructs, it will move slowly towards silence. The music is something else that will eventually vanish, like Lenin's corpse."

David Parry conducts The Embalmer, and has also provided the English translation of the libretto. "Battistelli's work has a deeply Italian sensibility," he says. "It's not neurotic in the style of post-Bergian Expressionism; rather it's emotionally responsive in the way that you think of Italian music as being. His experiments are about making total theatre, about controlling dramatic time through music."

'The Embalmer', Almeida at King's Cross, London N1 (020 7359 4404), Weds to 14 July