A lonely schoolboy named Bertil makes a magical friend who goes by Nils in “Nils Karlsson Däumling,” a children’s opera by Thierry Tidrow based on a fairy tale by Astrid Lindgren. Nils teaches Bertil to change his size by singing a spell-like song.
For contemporary classical composers, writing children’s opera can be similarly transfiguring — it’s like casting a spell that lets them be both big and small. Artists with highly experimental aesthetics get to embrace their silly sides and reconnect with the childlike urge to create.
In their work, and especially in opera, composers often feel an “immense pressure,” Tidrow said in an interview, “to show that you’re being original, that you know everything else that has been done, and that what you’re doing is apart from that.”
Writing for children, by comparison, can be liberating. As Tidrow often says, “They haven’t read Adorno.”
“Nils Karlsson Däumling,” an unusually mobile children’s opera, is scored for a soprano and a speaking violinist, and can be performed on a set that fits in a van. Partly for that reason, it has been performed more than 300 times since its premiere in 2019. But more sprawling children’s operas are also a regular feature of musical life in Europe. Vienna leads the way: In December, the Vienna State Opera opened a second venue, the Neue Staatsoper — known by its contracted name, the Nest — dedicated entirely to opera productions for children, families and young adults.
“It can be stressful being a living composer,” Bogdan Roscic, the State Opera’s general director, said in a phone interview. “And writing for children actually is very liberating, I think, simply because one can discover his inner child.”
A new children’s opera by Tidrow, “Sagt der Walfisch zum Thunfisch” (“What the Whale Told the Tuna”), inaugurated the Nest. His “The Conference of the Animals” premiered at the Musikverein, also in Vienna, in January and travels to the Philharmonie Luxembourg on Saturday. And his “Carnival of Emotions,” a piece for actors, the Gürzenich Orchestra and 300 schoolchildren, will premiere in Cologne, Germany, on March 27.
“Nils Karlsson Däumling” was the first work for children that Tidrow, 38, composed. It was commissioned by the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, which operates in Düsseldorf and Duisburg, Germany. Tidrow and the director Anselm Dalferth began rehearsals with just the story, a libretto and about 20 pages of Tidrow’s musical sketches, fleshing out the piece over six intensive weeks.
During that time, Tidrow wrote “music every day and every night,” he said, but he also conducted some market research. He and the piece’s violinist, Karin Nakayama, visited local day cares and conducted workshops. Nakayama performed music by Schubert for the children, as well as works by the living composers Adriana Hölszky and Salvatore Sciarrino. The children preferred the weirder, more modern music.
“Three-, 4- and 5-year-olds are really interested in bizarre or out-of-this-world sounds,” Tidrow said. “That, to them, is much more fascinating than a beautiful melody.”
That lesson is audible in the opera, a sweet and age-appropriate story about how a vivid imagination can ease loneliness. The speech-like violin part, representing Nils, is virtuosic, with a wide variety of unusual sounds. The kaleidoscopic musical material recalls Gyorgy Kurtag’s “Kafka-Fragmente,” a formidable 20th-century milestone for soprano and violin.
Writing these operas requires adult composers to see the world through children’s eyes — even when that reminds them of the unpleasant parts of being young. In 2013, Gordon Kampe, a composer and professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, wrote “Kannst du Pfeifen, Johanna?” (“Can You Whistle, Johanna?”), based on a book by Ulf Stark. In the story, Berra, a young boy who doesn’t have a grandfather, befriends an elderly man named Nils at a retirement home. They become close, but Nils dies in the end. When Kampe read the book to his own daughter, who was then about 5 or 6, at bedtime, he was nervous about broaching the subject of death with her.
“Now I’m not the composer with the commission,” Kampe, 48, recalled in an interview. “Suddenly I’m the dad who’s talking about existential things with his little kid. And that’s a kind of dramaturgy training, too.”
It turned out he didn’t need to worry. “She was a lot less moved than I was,” he said. Nils’s death stayed in the opera.
In “immmermeeehr” (“alllwaysmooore”), a children’s opera that premiered at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in November, Kampe captures the digitally enabled perceptual overload to which children today are constantly exposed. For the piece, the playwright Maria Milisavljevic wrote a libretto based on workshops with local children about the stresses of their everyday lives. It opens with a noisy snoring texture but soon erupts into loud, precisely rhythmic music that evokes the children’s increasingly regimented routines.
Similarly, Tidrow’s “The Conference of the Animals” looks at war, climate change and people’s inability to cooperate — all from a child’s perspective. His works in this genre aim to provide solace without facile escapism, and the opera cuts its serious themes with moments of silliness: Moths eat a pompous human general’s clothes, leaving him in his underwear; the bass flutist in the ensemble prances in spotted pants and a tail, playing a gender-bending giraffe named Geraldine.
When Tidrow invokes negative feelings like pain and fear, he realizes that children “get that emotion, and it’s really hard for them,” he said. “I try not to draw them out. I try to make them felt when I think they need to be felt.” As in the Disney film “Bambi,” a little darkness goes a long way.
Like movies for children, operas for them often include some material for older people. The pompous general in “The Conference of the Animals” submits demands to the animals by email. Kampe’s works for children include quotations from pieces like Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and Wagner’s “Das Rheingold.” His model for such Easter eggs for adults, he said, is “Shrek.”
Although this kind of writing allows composers to access their inner children, they need to be careful not to pretend to be children. Art that is right for young audiences does not talk down to them. A condescending tone — a kind of compositional baby voice — is deadly. So is a less serious approach than would be granted any piece for adults.
“It’s a little bit like if you’re talking to a kid and saying ‘uh huh, uh huh’ the whole time, but you’re actually on your phone,” Kampe said.
“When you’re speaking to children through composition,” he added, “you can’t do it as if you have your phone in your hand. Because they can tell, and then they’re gone.”
The audience may be different, but the artistic energy required is the same. Pieces for children, Kampe said, “aren’t quicker or easier or harder for me to write than an orchestral work for a festival.” In German, he noted, there is no diminutive for the word “Kunst,” or art.
Although composing for children is no less rigorous than writing for adults, it has the potential to be more rewarding. Contemporary music orthodoxies are irrelevant to children. So are the stereotypes that new music is overly intellectual, even ugly.
“I really love writing for children, and it feels really nice to not write for a certain type of middle class that I’m happy exists, but that also kind of deeply disgusts me,” Tidrow said. “It’s opened up my own naïveté in a way. I feel like I can really express my candor and my joy for music.”
“When I’m writing for an advanced audience,” he added, “it can be kind of soul-crushing.”
Kampe said that with his first works for children, “I noticed that I was able to write much more freely. When I started doing that, I was much freer than in other pieces. In those pieces, I always saw a new-music scene that expected certain things from me.”
But as elements from his children’s operas made their way back into his more serious works, Kampe realized that he had imposed those limitations on himself. Specialist audiences weren’t necessarily hostile to his zany side. “My self-fulfilling prophecy was nonsense, for over 10 years,” he said. “With these children’s operas, I found a form of aesthetic freedom for myself that I bring into my other pieces.” He now feels comfortable including the absurd and goofy in his works for the most rarefied new-music festivals.
Even if Kampe is remembered only for his works for children, that’s fine with him. One of his children’s operas includes a joke about the kind of day when everything feels annoying — even the “fly fart at half past five.” That text is accompanied by the motif of brass passing wind through their instruments.
At any performance, “the audience wants to bring something home with them,” Kampe said. “If it’s fly farts, then I’ll be the guy with the fly farts. There has to be something that one can bring into music history.”
