Midsummer Nights
Edited by Jeanette Winterson
Quercus £18.99, 384 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19

Life is heightened into stories, stories into song, and song into opera. Opera is at its best when it makes the most of its own contrivance, so that its dramatic intensity blasts us into a world we both recognise and have never seen before. It is a reflection of the grotesque and sublime choreography of life, which brings us back to stories.

This anthology, Midsummer Nights, celebrates the 75th anniversary of Glyndebourne opera house. Edited by author Jeanette Winterson, it includes an imaginative range of writers from Toby Litt to Ruth Rendell, Sebastian Barry and Marina Warner, each of whom has written in response to a chosen work. Almost all have kept the connection explicit and most of the stories take place if not within an opera, then at least in sight of an opera house.

Some have reacted playfully to the artfulness and absurdities of the medium. There are stories about operas whose own subject is opera, including Jackie Kay’s “First Lady of Song”, which takes on Janácek’s The Makropulos Affair. Kay’s deft, freewheeling account of singer Elina’s unnaturally long life deepens as a real person emerges from this character, almost as if stepping offstage.

Ali Smith’s delightful “Fidelio and Bess” has Beethoven’s prisoners emerging into Gershwin’s South Carolina, an idea that is the subject of a lovers’ quarrel. As they argue over whether the correct term for putting one opera inside another is “inject” or “interject”, it becomes clear that they are negotiating the interjection/injection of their relationship into their already committed lives.

Opera is more than just words and music. It shouldn’t be people standing around singing a story or describing things. One or two of these stories do seem to “stand around” but the theme has mostly prompted smart orchestration.

In Kate Atkinson’s “To Die For”, an American starlet by the perfect name of Skylar comes to London and meets a prince. The ensuing soap-operatics are intercut with the story of a couple who suffer the ordinary tragedy of mutual disappointment. With bold strokes, Atkinson pulls off a twist which shows how the hyperbole of opera can touch our essential selves. The married couple have tickets for La traviata. Which opera is it? the wife asks. “Tragic, inappropriate love, abandonment, death,” he whispers back. “Yes, but which one?” This formulaic, improbable work breaks her heart because it feels “more real than her own life”.

And what of opera’s greatest hits, those chocolate-box songs you loved but now dismiss as too obvious? Colm Tóibín’s “The Pearl Fishers” takes on Bizet’s famous duet Au Fond du Temple Saint and dusts the sugar right off. His marvellously subtle and painful dance between three old friends plays out a number of duets which end in conclusive acts of betrayal and release. Looking back, the narrator says how he soon came to think of that particular opera as “sweet and silly ... not Germanic or hard enough”. It is as if he is talking about his boyhood self.

Winterson herself has chosen a composer associated with opera for beginners: the “shamelessly romantic” Puccini. Her “Goldrush Girl”, a simply stated story of emotional courage, illuminates the heroism of Minnie, the bar owner of La Fanciulla del West. This story, like others here, touches on our need for text in order to convey subtext – drama, colour and noise that somehow allow us to hear what is being whispered: “I guess I could not judge the distances right; we both got too close, and yet stayed too far away.”

Art can overtake life as well as explain it, as illustrated in Lynne Truss’s “String and Air”. This grim warning against our habit of allusiveness takes its cue from Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, based on Henry James’s tantalisingly ambiguous ghost story. A costume designer mourning a cat called Furry Lise, adopts two more. She thinks it witty to name them after the two sinister children from the opera, Miles and Flora. This is, of course, a fatal mistake.

A man who solves his romantic difficulties by way of Così fan tutte has better luck. In Alexander McCall Smith’s “The Albanians”, Hugh can think of no better way of testing his girlfriend’s constancy than to follow the opera’s unlikely lead. He will meet her at a party in disguise to see if she succumbs to him as a stranger. What did those boys in the opera pretend they were? Albanians. He goes along to a costume hire agency and comes out with a lot of beard. Of course this ruse works in the opera and of course Hugh’s girlfriend sees through it immediately, but that’s not the point.

Opera can be boring and it can be moving, but it is never a casual or an ordinary experience. It is at its worst when trying to be so. As this inventive anthology shows, we should not underestimate the difference between being lifelike and bringing something to life.

Lavinia Greenlaw is author of ‘The Importance of Music to Girls’ (Faber) and also writes libretti, most recently a version of ‘Peter Pan’ for the composer Richard Ayres