A night at the
opera, with sex
and drug abuse.

LONDON - For all its chandeliersand- Champagne style, opera has long enjoyed a voyeuristic interest in low life. Half its heroines are fallen women, briefly flourishing in sin and paying in the end. But opera’s love affair with sleaze took on a new dimension when Anna Nicole Smith, the buxom Playboy centerfold and tabloid-culture princess (who died of an accidental drug overdose in 2007) took to the lyric stage.

It happened at no less an establishment than the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in “Anna Nicole,” a new opera that bears an adult-content warning on the posters, by the English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. British newspapers have been titillating readers with the prospect of a night of sung debauchery and moral outrage .

“If they think it’s going to be a girlie show, they’ll be disappointed,” said Elaine Padmore, the director of opera at Covent Garden. “It may be a tacky subject, but it won’t be tackily staged.”

For those who may not remember, Ms. Smith was a poor girl from Texas who found fame by exposing her surgically enhanced breasts serially and showing there were no depths to which a determined social climber couldn’t profitably sink. At 26 she married an 89-year-old billionaire who died a year later; she became embroiled in legal actions over the inheritance, then died herself at 39.

In between, she was a stripper, pinup, small-time actress and reality-TV star. And the highs or lows of her colorful existence included having a Caesarian delivery live on TV; appearing in Pieta-style photos with her dead son (who died from a drug overdose in her hospital room, where she had just given birth); having a posse of men claim paternity of her daughter (one of them, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt, a masseur married to Zsa Zsa Gabor); and playing an extraterrestrial kickboxer in a film in which her mission was to save Earth.

You couldn’t make it up.

On paper “Anna Nicole,” the opera, is a paragon of cultural credibility, involving the stage director Richard Jones, the conductor Antonio Pappano, the Wagnerian soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek and the baritone Gerald Finley. A Royal Opera commission, it reflects the company’s commitment to new work . And as a work based on real events much covered in the news media, it embodies the tradition of newsreel operas, like John Adams’s “Nixon in China,” a respectable precedent.

But it is a different precedent that has sent the British press into overdrive. For if the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith were not sensational enough as an idea for an opera, the libretto was written by Richard Thomas, the author of the infamously rude and risque “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” about the American talk show host, which caused gleeful outrage on both sides of the Atlantic several years ago.

Mr. Thomas says that “Anna Nicole” won’t be so robustly scatological, although the Royal Opera warns on its Web site of “extreme language, drug abuse and sexual content.”

“ ‘Anna Nicole’ is a parable,” Ms. Padmore said, “a bad fairy tale about a character so larger than life she becomes surreal. It’s also very funny, although I don’t think it laughs at her. It’s not cruel.”

Still, it does raise the question: Why this subject?

“It’s the wrong question,” Ms. Padmore says. “The process of creating this opera didn’t start with her. It started with wanting an opera from Mark-Anthony Turnage. We talked over a long period about what the subject could be. Eventually he came up with Anna, and it seemed like the right fit for his approach to composition, which is steeped in jazz and the whole idiom of contemporary American music.”

At 50, Mr. Turnage is one of Britain’s most successful classical composers. His work is championed by the conductor Simon Rattle, and his record has established him among the few composers today who truly know how to turn music into theater.

Born in 1960 in Grays, Essex, one of the drabber satellites of the workingclass East End of London, he made his name with music that projected upfront impact with a strident, streetwise edge: hard-hitting but seductive and politically aware.

In a recent interview he described “Anna” as music “with a nod to Broadway and a ballad Susan Boyle could sing.”

So where was the attraction to Anna Nicole Smith?

“Well, I wanted something contemporary,” Mr. Turnage said . “I wasn’t sure at first, but then I looked into her life and decided its strangeness gave it so much color there were possibilities. It’s a fantastic story.”

Ms. Westbroek, who sings the title role, said that her instructions were “not to impersonate Anna, which is as well, because I don’t look like her.”

“She was actually very beautiful,” Ms. Westbroek added. “And of course there were those breasts.”


By MICHAEL WHITE