Rufus Wainwright on new opera ‘Dream Requiem’ and working with Meryl Streep and Jane Fonda

It’s hard enough to guess what popstar, polymath, and Grammy-nominee Rufus Wainwright is going to do next at the best of times, least of which when it’s releasing a Lord Byron and climate change-inspired opera. Almost three decades into his career, Wainwright chats to Headliner about writing his new opera Dream Requiem during the pandemic, how it ended up enlisting the talents of Meryl Streep, Jane Fonda, Sharon Stone, and Carice Van Houten, and why he’s ready to re-enter the world of pop after this classical excursion.

One of the most acclaimed artists living today, the Canadian-American Wainwright is a two-time Juno award winner, a Grammy and BRIT award nominee, and something of a troubadour, touring since the age of 13. Born to folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III, his performing life debuted as a member of The McGarrigle Sisters and Family, which comprised his parents, his sister Martha Wainwright (who has also gone on to make a career of her own as an acclaimed songwriter) and his aunt Anna McGarrigle.

Prior to releasing his self-titled debut in 1998, Wainwright was regularly performing at club nights in Montreal, and then in New York once relocated there. Rufus Wainwright was released on the DreamWorks record label, coincidentally the studio behind Shrek, a film which brought extra attention to Wainwright’s career when its soundtrack featured his cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. 

His debut record showed early signs of his affinity for opera with its arrangements and singing style, and glowing reviews poured in from the world’s top music publications.

Opera has been a constant in Wainwright’s life, a fan of its music from an early age, with plenty of signs of that across his 12 studio albums. He joins the Zoom call from Barcelona ahead of a performance of Dream Requiem, where he will be performing the narration himself – as Sharon Stone dropped out due to the Los Angeles fires.

On his operatic awakening, he says, “I was about 13 years old, living in Montreal, I very much knew that I was gay. It never really occurred to me to be anything else,” he laughs. “It was around 1987 and AIDS was ravaging the gay male community. I was keenly aware of that and very frightened. So I was primed for a Gothic awakening,” he grins. 

“One evening, my aunt Anna came over to see my mum and we listened to Verdi's Requiem for the first time. From the moment it started until it ended, that whole two-hour period became a transformational moment that I experienced. When it ended, I was a completely different person. The next day all I wanted to hear was opera.

“Growing up in the music business, I figured out early that to survive, you needed a certain unique quality,” he furthers. “I think I knew that my love of opera would be a useful weapon; all the odd chord changes and the structures of arias that I could then infuse into my pop work and differentiate me from the herd.”

Dream Requiem is not Wainwright’s first contribution to the operatic oeuvre; the first was Prima Donna, which was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and released by Deutsche Grammophon in 2015. He followed this in 2018 with Hadrian, performed by the Canadian Opera Company, which premiered at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto. 

In a not-dissimilar vein, 2016 saw him release Take All My Loves in which he set nine of Shakespeare’s sonnets to music, with guest performances from Helena Bonham Carter, Carrie Fisher, William Shatner, his sister Martha Wainwright, and Florence Welch.

The latest opera opens with Oscar-winner Meryl Streep ominously reciting Lord Byron’s Darkness: “I had a dream that was not all a dream.” She is followed by a passage of harp and cor anglais. After two instrumental pieces, the opera singers join on the third track of the album, Lux Perpetua. The album recording is taken from the opera’s premiere in Paris last year, in which Streep took part.

Dream Requiem is a reflection on climate change and environmental collapse, using text taken from the Latin Mass For The Dead (which has also appeared in operas by Verdi, Britten, and Mozart) and Lord Byron’s poem Darkness, a work that is also concerned with collapsing ecology.

“Yes, we did it with Meryl,” Wainwright says as if it’s no big deal. “I'm here in Barcelona for tonight’s performance. Sharon Stone was supposed to do it but sadly, because of the fires in L.A, she just didn't feel comfortable leaving Los Angeles. 

"So I'm stepping in to be the narrator here in Barcelona, which I'm very excited about. Then on May 4th, in Los Angeles at Disney Hall, Jane Fonda will be the narrator. That's going to be quite the evening, considering both what's going on in California and also in the United States.”

In terms of enlisting Streep, it wasn’t a case of sending a cold-approach email — she and Wainwright were already friends. “A lot of these kinds of relationships start out because you're just at the same function. Whether it's a fundraiser, the GRAMMYS, or an Oscar party, you do run into these people. We offered the role to several people, and a few were interested but didn’t have time, but Meryl came back immediately and 100% wanted to do it.”

And with regards to Fonda, it turns out there was no need to even ask her to be part of the L.A performance. “I’m very close with Jane. She's someone I very quickly became friends with in L.A. One day we were sitting talking, and I mentioned to her about the Paris premiere and about Meryl being involved, and Jane turned to me and said ‘I’m gonna do L.A’.”

As if those names being dropped aren’t outrageous enough, the Amsterdam performance will be narrated by Carice Van Houten, who many will know best as Melisandre, or the Red Woman, from Game Of Thrones. 

The opera came about in an interesting way for Wainwright — prior to the COVID lockdowns, he had been asked to write an opera for the Greek National Opera. Unable to commit to a full opera, he started writing them a smaller piece for performance, and while looking for some text to set the music to, he was eventually led to Lord Byron’s Darkness. 

Around the same time, a collaborator suggested he should try writing a requiem around the Latin Mass For The Dead. This led him to the genesis of the idea for Dream Requiem.

“The Greek National Opera wanted something around the Greek Revolution because it was the anniversary,” he says. “I couldn't give them an opera, but I’d write a piece of music with some text. I was really set on it being contemporary, very hard, cutting edge, very brutal and modern. I had an idea to look at transcripts from the island of Lesbos, from migrants and refugees pouring into Europe from Africa.

“But then along the way, a friend of mine told me the person who's most associated with the Greek Revolution is the poet Lord Byron. He helped fund it, and he also died in the revolution. I immediately said that I wasn’t into it. I've done the romantic thing, Prima Donna, Hadrian. A few days later, I took out my phone, and I very discreetly Googled Byron and the Greek Revolution just to see what would come up. 

"I was thinking I’d just check this out for two seconds. The first thing that came up was the poem Darkness. I started reading it, and I thought, ‘Oh shit. Here we go. We're back in the romantic age. There goes my hip new project’. The words just jumped off the page and I got the message that I had to compose this and do something with this poem.”

In terms of how his 2025 is shaping up, Wainwright says, “The Requiem is going to a lot of other cities. I'm also going to be doing my solo shows here and there. I'm actually taking June and July off to do nothing, which I think is very important. Once the fall rolls around, I'm very much looking forward to going into the studio and making a pop record. I've missed being in the studio and just doing songs. 

"During this period, I've been writing kind of furiously, I hate to admit it, but it will be nice to ignore some of what's going on in the United States and just be in a dark studio room where there's no sense of time or space.”

If you’re going to be in Los Angeles on May 4th, you’d be mad to miss the Walt Disney Concert Hall performance of Dream Requiem with Fonda narrating. The same goes for the June 20th Amsterdam Concertgebouw rendition with Carice van Houten. Beyond that, it’s a case of seeing what Wainwright comes up with next after he reenters the studio later this year. Whatever it may be, it feels a fairly safe bet that it will further cement his status as one of our most cherished songwriters and performers.

Main image credit: Miranda Penn Turin