A Kind Man

Finney on adapting Susan Hill’s novel as an opera

The plot of A Kind Man revolves in part around the threat of the cancer that Tommy has to endure. Like Susan Hill and most people, I have had my share of unextraordinary sadness; my wife Anya died in 2009 after living with cancer for eight years. So I had skin in the game.

I also remembered the conversation I had with my wife’s doctor on the morning she passed away. I had asked the doctor how she felt Anya was doing. Rather than answer me, she gently led me, by a series of her own questions and my answers, to a recognition that Anya would die within a short time.

I added that memory as dialogue of my own to the first scene that I composed in 2018. That is an exceptional interpolation of my story; for the most part, I have used Hill’s own words as the source of my libretto’s dialogue.

As a younger man, I read most of Hill’s fiction and snapped up A Kind Man when it was published in 2011. I was immediately struck by the very pithy dialogue, plot and character depiction. There was nothing spare in this concise and moving tale where, in a time of hardship, a young and loving couple, Tommy and Eve are assailed by a double tragedy. However, they are visited by a miracle that Tommy decides to share with his community.

It occurred to me that it would make a great play or opera, and so I amused myself by going through the dialogue with a highlighter, as well as seeing what passages of description could be transposed into dialogue.

And there I left it.

I had a dream one night in the autumn of 2018. In that dream, I had written an opera and, because it was my dream, it sounded wonderful. When I woke up, I remembered the dream, but had no memory of the music.

A little later that morning, however, a brief three-note musical-‘thing’ would not leave my head. So I did a little work on it and found I was writing what felt to me to be a rather tense piece of music. Then for some reason, Hill’s A Kind Man came to mind and I thought I’d like to experiment with the scene from the book where the doctor visits Eve and she considers the probability of her husband dying.

I looked at my copy of the novel and saw the annotations I had made back in 2011 and set to work. After writing two scenes, I began to think that I might be onto something but I knew that before I went any further, I had to find out whether Susan Hill would allow me to write an opera based on her novel. I approached her and to my great pleasure she agreed:

“I am always delighted to have any collaboration etc with composers so I am delighted you think the novel of interest … go ahead ... I will be glad to hear what you make of it. I am rather fond of that novel!”

A major influence on me for settling on this tale as the source of my opera was Janacek’s opera Jenůfa, which, for me, is also a tale of an ordinary couple, Jenůfa and Laca, who rise above their tragic circumstances.

I do not view Hill’s story as a tale of exceptional people. I think of it as a depiction of the unsurprising presence of love, selflessness and hope in an ‘ordinary’ life.