The Case of the Stolen Jane Eyre

The Sunday Times publishes an interview with the composer Michael Berkeley in their series Best of Times/Worst of Times. The composer of the opera Jane Eyre (1999) remembers how he felt when the (only) manuscript score of the opera was stolen.

One of the hardest things for a composer of opera is finding the right text. Jane Eyre worked for me because it’s all about hearing a voice. While a novel can only tell you about hearing voices in the ether, music actually allows you to hear them.

I usually allow five years to complete an opera. By early summer 1999 I’d been working on Jane Eyre for three years. It had been commissioned by Music Theatre Wales, and was to be premiered at the Cheltenham Festival in 2000, then performed at 18 venues across the UK. (...)

In June I escaped to my farmhouse in Wales to work on the score of Jane Eyre. By August, when it was time to return to London, I felt I’d broken the back of it.

I decided to take the work with me to continue with it. Piles of paper — three years of work — went into an artist’s portfolio case, which I piled in the car with my dog, Otter, and the rest of my things.

In London, after parking outside our house in Ladbroke Grove, I got out the front-door keys, picked up Otter, opened up the house and turned off the alarm. I returned to the car to bring in everything else, apart from the portfolio case. I didn’t bother to lock the car and walked back to the house, bags on every finger. Then back to the car one last time. No portfolio case. It had gone. I was stunned.

Hoping against hope it had not been stolen, I called Steven, who looks after the farm. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t find my portfolio case. Please could you check my study? Or perhaps I left it out by the car?” Steven went off to look and rang back. It wasn’t there. Then I knew for sure it had been taken.

It was the last thing you’d expect a thief to go for: big and bulky and not easy to run away with. Everyone seemed confident that whoever had taken it, realising there was no money inside, would have dumped it nearby. Family and friends went looking in bins. But eventually I had to accept that three years’ work, all that music I’d slaved over, was probably in some landfill site. (...)

At that point, I realised that if I didn’t start again immediately, I would never do it. I asked Music Theatre Wales what was the latest date I could deliver the score. They gave me a deadline of under a year, and I went back to Wales to work with nothing but the principal melodies in my head. (...)

On December 1, 1999, the Queen came to open the renovated Royal Opera House. She’d been briefed about who’d be introduced to her, and when it was my turn she was absolutely charming. “I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to lose something like that,” she said. “Do you think it was stolen deliberately?” I replied: “Well, ma’am, I very much doubt a single one of your subjects would deliberately steal a contemporary opera.” She roared with laughter and called Prince Philip over to share the joke.

The pressures of the Royal Opera House and losing my opera culminated in something of an annus horribilis for me. But now when I go to Covent Garden and I see the fruits of our work, and the Opera House in such good form, it seems worth the pain we went through.

And with Jane Eyre too, in some extraordinary way, things came together in the end. Though I would never want to write under that pressure again, I feel the final version was more taut than the original. When it was first performed I was too emotionally involved to judge. But in May 2005 there was a production in Australia and it was very gratifying to go there, see what they’d done and think: “Yes. This works.” (Sue Fox)

Jane Eyre was premiered last year in the US in Saint Louis.
Picture source.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Music, Opera