Roger Waters is Working On Opera Based On Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’

Pink Floyd’s sometime frontman and chief songwriter Roger Waters is officially collaborating with the Opera de Montreal to create an opera based on the band’s classic album The Wall.

The opera production, titled Another Brick in The Wall: The Opera, will face the tough task of integrating Pink Floyd’s classic rock sound in their magnum opus The Wall into its symphonies.

Roger Waters was initially skeptical of this marriage of rock and roll and opera.

He noted to Rolling Stone, “It had been my experience that experiments in collaboration between the worlds of rock and roll and the worlds of symphonic music were generally disastrous and should be embarked upon with extreme trepidation.”

But despite Waters’ “trepidation” and doubt, the Pink Floyd production is going forward and is slated to open in March 2017 in the Opera de Montreal for the 375th anniversary of the city.

So what brought about this change of heart? Why is Roger Waters collaborating with the Opera when he thought that the worlds of rock and symphonic music were incompatible?

The Pink Floyd songwriter admitted to France24 that the Opera was “very persuasive.”

He said, “I sat there not expecting to be moved, and I was moved. Very moved. So I approach this project with great enthusiasm.”

Roger Waters will be writing the libretto for the The Wall opera. He is no stranger to adapting the classic album to other art forms; he wrote the screenplay for the 1982 film Pink Floyd: The Wall, which was the cinematic adaption of The Wall.

The Wall deviendra opéra à MTL https://t.co/nlwteAO4lU @LeDevoir @rogerwaters #PinkFloyd #TheWall @operademontrealpic.twitter.com/hXyIZmDeoN

— Annik Mata Hari (@agent_matahari) March 4, 2016

The story behind Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall is one that explores themes of self-isolation, the effects of fame, and abandonment, and stars an alienated rock star, the eponymous Pink Floyd.

It is quite fitting that it is Montreal that gets this Pink Floyd adaptation, for it is said that Roger Waters wrote The Wall after a particularly frustrating concert in Montreal in 1977. Waters’ peaked annoyance on that Montreal day in 1977 led him to spit on a fan and subsequently ending the concert.

The story of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, about a disillusioned and alienated rock star who builds an actual wall to separate himself from the rest of the world, originates from this spitting incident, after which Roger Waters imagined a wall between himself and the audience every time he performed.

So, this new opera adaptation of The Wall brings the Pink Floyd songwriter and singer full circle. It was Roger Waters’ alienation that led him to end that Montreal concert in 1977 and build that imaginary wall. Now, it is his evolution as a rockstar that has brought him here, to the marriage of opera and rock and roll, in Montreal.

He said to Rolling Stone, “The Wall is about the journey from the enmity of spitting in someone’s face to the position where love becomes more important than that enmity.”

Thus, Waters, in bringing The Wall back to Montreal — where it all started — and transforming it into an opera, is showing a real evolution for the album and the music.

If The Wall was about one rock star’s journey of alienation and frustration, a journey that begins in spitting on another’s face, then it is the autobiographical journey of Pink Floyd then-frontman Roger Waters.

This adaption to an opera, then, is an important next step of the Pink Floyd journey. Thus, the journey that started in 1965 with the formation of the legendary band is still not over in 2016.

[Photo by John Fusco/Getty Images]