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In bringing to life Elliott Gyger and Pierce Wilcox’s Oscar and Lucinda, which opens at Carriageworks on 27 July, director Patrick Nolan and designer Anna Tregloan’s biggest challenge was presenting the central image from Peter Carey’s novel – a man drowning in a glass cathedral floating down a river – on stage. Nolan says, with a laugh: “Having water in an environment where electricity is everywhere, is hair-raising.” As for glass, “If it breaks, you’re in a lot of trouble.” Glass and water are the two things you never put on stage. “Perhaps that captures the risk of putting on new opera!” Nolan says, laughing again.

Director and designer faced another headache: staging a musically complex new opera for which there was no recording. As Nolan says: “Normally you’d familiarise yourself with the score by listening to it, as this enables you to see how it will come to life.” Working on a production without having heard the music or studied the score is, to say the least, difficult. Tregloan adds: “The Oscar and Lucinda score is out there of course, but I’m not able to study such difficult music from the score only!”

After many conversations with lighting designer Damien Cooper, Nolan and Tregloan found the solution to their first problem: light. “Through reflection, light can conjure up both water and glass,” Nolan says. As for the music: they relied on Elliott Gyger and conductor Jack Symonds to fill in the gaps. “Elliott and Jack have been describing the music to us in as much detail as possible,” Nolan says. “Staging opera is always an act of the imagination, but with a new work, you really have to enter into it.”

To music lovers it might seem that composer Elliott Gyger arrived on the opera scene fully formed in 2015, when Sydney Chamber Opera premiered his Fly Away Peter. But speaking to Gyger on the first day of rehearsals for his second opera, Oscar and Lucinda, one realises that this composer’s journey began on the day he was born   

The son of opera critic David Gyger and music academic Alison Gyger, listening to and attending opera was like eating breakfast to Elliott. He was four and a half when he wrote his first piece of music, a song of which his parents wrote down the words, and not much older when he attended his first opera performance, an open dress rehearsal of the first two acts of Aida, at the Sydney Opera House. Gyger remembers being entranced by the spectacle, but frightened by the noise. “During the triumphal scene I hid under a chair!” he laughs.   

At six he attended his first full-length opera, The Magic Flute. “I was delighted,” he remembers. Nothing about it seemed strange; moreover, when studying languages later at school, he found that Italian, French and German came very naturally to him. “I’d heard them sung around the house for years.”

Gyger wrote his first formal piece of music at nine. He blames his flute teacher, Belinda Webster, now director of the Tall Poppies classical music recording label, for the event. “In class one week she told us that for homework we had to write a solo piece for flute. Next week we came back and I was the only one who’d actually done it. So I can credit Belinda Webster with the start of my composition career.”

His first hands-on opera experience came when he was in the children’s chorus for three Australian Opera productions: Boris Godunov, La Bohème and Tosca. He remembers it as an introduction to the making of opera: the rehearsal process, the difference between a piano score and a full score, the vocal ranges, the mechanics of getting around a stage.

He also remembers the Act I church scene in Tosca, and the coronation scene in Boris Godunov, as pivotal in triggering his decision to become a composer. “Both scenes have amazing orchestral representations of bells, with the harmony powerfully invoking both sonority and emotion. It was almost overwhelming to be on stage with that music playing around you. I wondered if I could write music that would make people feel the same way.”

The path to true love is seldom without obstacles though, and in his late teens Gyger experienced “a bit of a reaction” against the high melodrama of the operatic canon. He loved the Australian Opera’s Britten and Janáček productions though. Two key pieces from this time were Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, a kind of operatic theme and variations, and Berg’s Wozzeck, built from tiny pieces constructed with precision and power. These works taught Gyger that an orderly musical structure enables a composer to take risks with extremes of emotion and contrast, a lesson that would stand him in good stead when years later he wrote his own operas.

While still in his teens he did begin to write an opera, only to realise, half a scene in, that he didn’t know what he was doing. “I was trying to run before I could walk.” He would not try again for many years. Having graduated from Sydney University, where he studied composition with Ross Edwards and Peter Sculthorpe, he headed for Harvard, where he completed his PhD in Composition under the guidance of Bernard Rands, who’d taught Anne Boyd, and Argentinian composer Mario Davidovsky.

He spent four more years teaching at Harvard before returning to Australia. “The US is so vast, it’s very easy for composers to forget that there’s a world outside it,” he says. “The advantage of being smaller and further away from the big cultural magnets of Europe, is that we can be more open to cultural influences from elsewhere. Asia for example.”

Having focused on choral and instrumental writing in his early career, a turning point for Gyger was From the Hungry Waiting Country, premiered by Halcyon in 2006, in which he combined vocal and instrumental music for the first time. When SCO was established in 2010, founding member Louis Garrick approached him with a view to doing a project with the company. Fly Away Peter grew from that.