Pop making sense -- of opera

In the 19th century, operatic tunes could be heard on the streets of Italy mere days after their debuts in the theater. Today, it generally takes longer for them to reach a popular forum.

The latest such street singer is David Byrne -- who’s both an obvious and an unlikely messenger. During his years with Talking Heads, his extensive solo career and his tenure running the Luaka Bop world music label, Byrne may have drawn from as many sources as anyone in musical history.

He’s written songs that adapt the Velvet Underground to African dances, applied the Minimalism aesthetic to punk rock, brought contemporary Cuban music to U.S. audiences, reissued out-of-print psychedelic Tropicalia, composed a Sumerian suite for Robert Wilson and, memorably, crooned Al Green deadpan. He’s also written orchestral film scores.

Until recently, the master of pop eclecticism had not really wrangled with mainstream Western classical music. But his new album, “Grown Backwards,” which is drawing some of his best reviews since he broke up Talking Heads in 1991, includes two opera selections, by Bizet and Verdi; one is a duet with singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright.

“I’m not a huge opera buff,” Byrne says from Manchester, England, where he’s just completed a preconcert sound check. “But I was aware that some of my favorite songs were opera, and I put them on my iPod. These songs are incredibly beautiful, and ironically they come in at about three minutes, most of ‘em -- they’re right in there with pop songs. They even have choruses.”

Byrne adds that he’s been listening to opera for a decade and makes the occasional trip to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. “But it was only recently that I realized, ‘This is a song -- it’s in my range, I can sing it, and it has this incredible emotional resonance.’ It finally sunk in.

“I figured I wouldn’t put it to a techno beat, but I’d move it a little closer to the pop song that people were used to.” For backup on the opera tracks, he used “a chamber ensemble, and there’s a Fender Rhodes piano on one and a prepared piano with an accordion on the other.” Most of the album’s tracks, in fact, were recorded with the Texas-based Tosca Strings.

Byrne knows it’s become a cliche for rock musicians to dabble in classical music. “Sometimes they delve into it as a desperate attempt for respect and credibility -- to show, ‘Yes, I am a trained musician.’ ”

Byrne’s operatic excursions have been mostly well received. “It’s no great surprise that the shape-shifting Byrne has chosen opera as his latest foray,” said the All Music Guide, “but what is surprising is that it works.”

For “Au fond du temple saint” from Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers,” perhaps best known from the film “Gallipoli,” Byrne called Wainwright, whom he knew slightly, and asked if he wanted to record a duet.

“He said, ‘I know it!’ ” Byrne recalls. “And he said immediately, ‘Do you know the recording by Jussi Bjorling?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I do happen to know that recording. That’s where I first heard that song and I think it’s still my favorite recording.’ I think our phrasing and our tempo were based a little on that.”

Wainwright, by coincidence, had been singing the duet since he was a teenager, often with friends of his mother, folk singer Kate McGarrigle.

“I’ve been an opera fan since I was about 13,” says Wainwright, who now has a bust of Verdi in his apartment and attends productions at the Met, Covent Garden in London and Milan’s La Scala. “Like most normal people, I hated opera -- until I heard a recording of Verdi’s ‘Requiem.’ Then I developed this tremendous appetite for it.”

His attraction to opera, he thinks, derives in part from his having come of age in the 1980s as AIDS raged. “For a while, it was just a given that if you were gay you were going to die. And it seemed like opera addressed that in a really beautiful and forgiving way. I think that’s one of the reasons I took refuge in that music.”

Also, he says, operatic music offers chordal and key changes that are exhilarating to sing. “Sometimes I found the chord changes in pop music to be pretty predictable,” whereas in opera “songs aren’t structured in patterns. They’re more like voyages.”

Opera brought Wainwright to classical instrumental music, and these days he also loves Sibelius and Brahms.

The second operatic selection on Byrne’s disc is “Un di felice, Eterea” from Verdi’s “La Traviata.” Byrne is performing the number on an international tour that currently has no L.A. date.

Byrne says it’s not necessarily harder to sing an aria than a rock song. “The hard ones are some of the old ones like [Talking Heads’] ‘Road to Nowhere’ that go from a calm, normal voice to a full-on high-register shout. That just takes its toll,” he says. “I thought, ‘Thank God I didn’t write two songs like that.’ The audience loved it, but it was really murder on the voice.”

Working backward

In operatic arias, Byrne hears both similarities to and differences from equally amorous soul music.

“The thing about a lot of soul songs is there’s a subtext where it’s kinda sexy, while at least for me, a lot of the opera is almost purely heart -- it’s either tragic or purely heartfelt passion. And not so much lust. Maybe that was going on more in the stalls.”

Byrne’s first exposure to classical music was in high school, when he was turned on to records by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, some of which he foraged for at the Baltimore Public Library.

And during his year at the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as the years that followed in 1970s New York, he was aware of musical Minimalism.

Some early Talking Heads songs, such as “Warning Sign,” showed the band “trancing out,” as Byrne puts it, by repeating rhythmic figures endlessly. Minimalism’s impact also went beyond music, he notes. “There were a lot of painters and artists in that time who were influenced by Morton Feldman and Steve Reich.”

From composers like that, Byrne worked backward to other classical music, though rarely does it slip into his daily listening the way opera does.

Not long ago, though, he attended a performance of the Schubert song cycle “Winterreise” staged by choreographer Trisha Brown.

“Boy, I just thought it was amazing,” he says. “The songs were great, but also what she did to it made it jarring, a little bit contemporary.”

Still, “I personally thought the texts were a little bit over the top, so cliched,” he says, laughing. “Every title was like ‘The Graveyard.’ I just thought, ‘Oh come on now. We wouldn’t allow that in a British rock band!’ ”