Reborn Covent Garden takes a big gamble with lavish Holocaust opera

"This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair... "

The closing lines of Sophie's Choice by William Styron are among the most poignant in modern literature and they could have almost been written for the Royal Opera House. For tomorrow it will take the biggest risk in its recent history by staging a new work about the Holocaust, costing more than £100,000 a performance.

The opera of Sophie's Choice has had money and talent lavished on it like no other new production. It will be directed by Sir Trevor Nunn, who has taken time out from running the National Theatre, and Nicholas Maw's score will be conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, who has returned from the Berlin Philharmonic to take up the baton.

Last night, with less than 48 hours to go to curtain up, Rattle was calling it "the most significant British opera of the last 50 years", a claim which would put it up there with Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd and Michael Tippett's King Priam.

It is certainly the most gargantuan enterprise attempted on an opera stage in this country for decades. With a cast of 80, 18 separate set changes, and a running time in excess of four hours, Sophie's Choice is a marker of the new Covent Garden's reborn ambition.

Its complicated set, which takes in Auschwitz, including a train of cattle trucks that brought the heroine there, and Brooklyn streets and apartments, has been devised by Rob Howell, who won an Olivier award last year for his work with Nunn at the National on Troilus and Cressida.

Nor could the subject matter be more sensitive and difficult. William Styron's 1979 book, on which it is closely based, has regularly been voted one of the top 100 great American novels, a doomed romance which asks some of the big questions about the horrors of the 20th century.

The story of a beautiful Polish war victim, Sophie Zawistowska, who is haunted by the terrible choice she had to make to survive in the camps, reached a wider public through the film version, which won Meryl Streep an Oscar 20 years ago.

But any musical depiction of the Nazi death camps and the effects on their survivors carries the inherent risks of causing offence on one hand, and of testing the endurance of audiences on the other.

The fate of the House rests on the shoulders of a 67-year-old composer of two comic operas, who wrote his last one more than 30 years ago.

Maw, who has a reputation for tuneful and melodic music, will be praying chance is a little kinder to him this time. The Rising of the Moon, his last opera, a deft historical skit on the British military in Ireland, opened with disastrous timing just as the troops were sent on to the streets in Northern Ireland.

Unusually, Maw has also written the libretto, and even more unusually he has reportedly tinkered with his score to help smooth Nunn's staging. The production is also a huge commercial gamble, with the set and costumes alone costing £450,000 for only five performances and a schools matinee. The bill for singers, extras, orchestra and conductor, not to mention writer's fees and the cost of development, could eventually add on a further £150,000.

Sophie's Choice sold out long ago after ticket prices were capped at £50, making it cheaper than may West End shows. That, however, also limited its payback at the box office. Although it will be broadcast on radio and television, only by transferring successfully to opera houses abroad are its costs likely to be recouped.

The Opera House claimed yesterday that it has budgeted for the massive spend, twice its usual £300,000 limit for new productions. The expense was necessary, it insisted, to do justice to the epic and emotive nature of Styron's book.

Elaine Padmore, director of opera at Covent Garden, said: "We knew it was going to be expensive, so some time ago we altered our plans to take that into effect. It is not as if we have suddenly discovered an overspend. It is very hard when a work is not finished to have an accurate budget. You have to have some flexibility to re spond to what is being created." She said the costs would be spread out and the season as a whole would still be on budget.

The opera is the first major piece commissioned by Covent Garden since Alexander Goehr's Arianna in 1995. Before that, it is necessary to go back to Harrison Birtwistle's Gawain in 1991.

Padmore said the fearsome costs of staging new largescale operas had put a brake on creativity in the past, but if Sophie's Choice "delivers", all that would change. The risk was worth it, she argued. "It is something we passionately want to do, but there is a lot of expenditure. You have to space them out."

Two more new operas, one a version of The Tempest by Thomas Ades, and another Birtwistle based on the legend of the Minotaur, are in the pipeline. "There is huge expectation, and a real buzz in the building about Sophie," Padmore added.

"Nicholas Maw has delivered a great score. Simon Rattle thinks it is the most significant British opera of the last 50 years. He is conducting it, so when he thinks that, heavens, you have to say 'Wow!'" Certainly the word coming out of Covent Garden after one of the final rehearsals yesterday was very good indeed. Angelika Kirchschlager, the Austrian mezzo-soprano who plays Sophie, is said to be "staggeringly good. She makes the whole thing intimate and heartbreaking".

The transition of Sophie's Choice from the page to the stage has almost been as long and tortuous as the Opera House's own recent travails around its rebuilding.

The work's genesis goes back to Jeremy Isaac's days, and it was commissioned by Nicholas Payne, late of English National Opera, six years ago. But it would have been impossible to stage such an ambitious scenario in the old opera house, according to Padmore.

Rodney Milnes, of Opera magazine, said: "Any production is an investment. The fact that it has sold out is a very good sign and surely one of the American opera companies will take it."

· The opera will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 live on December 10 and BBC4 on December 21.

Spectacles, follies and flops on a grand scale

· San Francisco Opera spent $3.8m on a spectacular revival of Charpentier's little-known Louise three years ago, only be to be kebabed by the critics. "Overwrought," they cried, "the production hits its audience like melted raclette on new potatoes: viscous, heavy and imbued with a disconcerting blend of the tasty and the malodorous." Even the great soprano Renee Fleming couldn't save it

· The Cuban-born billionaire Alberto Vilar, who has endowed Covent Garden lavishly, promised $4m dollars for a production of War and Peace which Placido Domingo was trying to stage at Los Angeles Opera with the Kirov. But he could not provide extra funds and the opera was cancelled

· Some $4.7m was spent on a production of Verdi's Aida at Luxor in Egypt five years ago. The organisers' hope of a huge international hit was eclipsed when Islamists machine-gunned a tourist bus in Cairo. The opera had 700 Egyptian soldiers as extras and an all-Italian cast.

· A year later the British impresario Harvey Goldsmith staged the largest of the arena operas seen in this country when he put Aida on at Earl's Court in London.

With no fewer than 600 singers and dancers, donning 1,500 costumes on a massive four-tier stage, it cost well into six figures. While the critics were mostly unimpressed, the public seemed to like it.

The Royal Opera's Turandot in Wembley Arena and Raymond Gubbay's lavish Madame Butterfly at the Royal Albert Hall also showed the power of arena opera

· Derided by critics as "appalling kitsch", Ludwig, a £25m "opera" based on the life of the mad Bavarian king, was staged two years ago in a purpose-built theatre beneath his most famous castle, Neuschwanstein. Like Ludwig's enterprises, it was an expensive folly. Two Lipizzaner horses pulled the royal sleigh on a revolving stage, and in the final scene the king drowned in 100-tonne tank of water.