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In the cult-fave cartoon “All the Great Operas in 10 Minutes,” animator Kim Thompson deadpans that opera “is just a lot of people in costumes, falling in love and dying. Yup that’s pretty much it. Oh yeah, except for the music — some of it’s nice if you like that kind of thing.”
Rufus Wainwright does in fact like that kind of thing, and now he tosses his hat into the arena alongside Puccini, Verdi and Wagner. Wainwright’s debut opus, “Prima Donna,” makes its American debut on Feb. 19 for the New York City Opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a four-show engagement.
Wainwright has recorded 10 pop albums, including the upcoming “Out of the Game,” due next month. He says his love of opera isn’t new or a passing fancy. He’s been into it since grade school.
“I was a normal child for many years, I listened to the usual pop stuff that Casey Kasem was playing, and I watched MTV when they played music videos,” he tells The Post. “Then one day my mother brought home a copy of Verdi’s ‘Requiem.’ ”
While the “Requiem” is not an opera, Wainwright said, “It’s a very operatic piece, and Verdi was one of the great opera composers.”
That record changed him.
“At the end I was completely hooked, and I was transformed into a 75-year-old opera queen,” says Wainwright. Despite that, over the years this openly gay singer/songwriter mostly stayed in the opera closet, occasionally showing off his bombastic vocal skills on recordings with another opera buff, David Byrne. His opera addiction ran so deep in his song “Barcelona” that Wainwright borrowed lyrics from Verdi’s “Macbeth.”
Wainwright says his attraction to the genre was also fueled by his generation’s connection to the ’90s grunge-rock movement. “When I was getting into opera, a lot of my friends were getting into bands like Nirvana,” he says. “You might not think it, but opera has a lot of the same edge and darkness.”
While he speaks French — he was raised in Montreal after his mother, Kate McGarrigle, and father, Loudon Wainwright III, divorced — his fluency in Italian was lacking. “I didn’t understand much of the [Italian] in Verdi, but not understanding added to the mystery opera presents.”
While preparing “Prima Donna,” Wainwright, 38, went through his own language-based drama. “There was a little trouble with the Metropolitan Opera,” he says. “They originally commissioned my opera.”
While that was a great honor, it came with a price that was artistically too high for Wainwright.
Since “Prima Donna” is set in Paris and Wainwright is fluent in French, that was the language the libretto — about a fading soprano trying to mount a comeback — was written in. “To be quite honest, I have issues with most operas in English,” he says. “English doesn’t click for me in opera. So I kept writing in French. The Met kept asking when I was going to translate it into English. I said I would, but as I continued I felt there was no reason to change.”
The problem was Peter Gelb, managing director of the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, says Wainwright. He didn’t consider an opera sung in French and set in Paris an American work despite the composer’s US nationality.
“I mean [Gelb] should consider that the first opera to ever play at the Met was ‘Faust’ by [Charles] Gounod, and it was in French,” Wainwright says with the tone of a ruler-wielding schoolmarm. “There’s a long history of the French language at the Met, so it all seems very silly to me.”
While the prestige of a Metropolitan Opera premiere isn’t lost on Wainwright, he acknowledges that if the show were still in the hands of the Met, rather than the New York City Opera where it eventually found its home, the production might still be in planning stages.
“The Met is such a massive machine,” Wainwright laments, “it takes years for anything to happen. In a way it was a gift the Met dropped its option because [‘Prima Donna’] premiered much sooner [in 2009] in the UK, and my mother got to see it before she died.”
In Manchester, a working-class English city, the opera got the mixed reception you’d expect. Wainwright says, “I got some fabulous reviews, and other reviews tried to draw blood. Opera criticism is as operatic as opera, and it survived for this New York opening at BAM.
“No one dies in this opera,” Wainwright confirms, “I was keen on that, but there are other clichés, like the fat lady does sing at the end, and there are a few fainting spells and an evil butler — but nobody dies.”
“Prima Donna” is an opera about an opera singer’s survival. There is love, heartbreak and intrigue in the production, and if the critics are kind, death will finally get to take a holiday from the opera, too.