In 2008 Scottish Opera began its 5:15 series; five 15-minute operatic works by new pairings from Scotland’s musicians and writers. As Scottish Opera general director Alex Reedjik explains, ‘I fell into conversation with Craig Armstrong and he told me that he’d had an urge to write a piece of opera. So I simply asked him, “who do you want to write it with?” He mentioned Ian Rankin, so I wrote to Ian and he told me that, funnily enough, he’d just had a dream about writing an opera.’
The result was Gesualdo, a libretto about the sixteenth-century Italian composer who murdered his wife and lover – a tale of dastardly deeds that could have crept straight from the pages of Ian Rankin’s Rebus books.
