When She Died... Death of a Princess (2002) Online

When she died… I was out of the country, cycling round France, so I missed the mass hysteria. Seeing it in this film and in the recent film The Queen came as quite a surprise to me. I imagine many people are quite embarrassed now about their overreaction at the time.

This short opera, by Jonathan Dove depicts the reaction of three couples to Princess Diana's death, people who imagined that they knew her and took her loss personally. There is a couple who set off for the funeral in their Austin Maxi, you just know it is going to break down on the way. There is a woman who has had a phantom pregnancy and wanders through the crowns singing "I've lost my baby". Strangest of all is a man who employs a hooker to dress up as the princess.

The singing, as in Jonathan Dove's recent work "Man on the Moon" is conversational, like recitative.The music only really comes alive in the orchestral bits and the brief choruses. I was particularly irritated by the Austin Maxi woman who sounded like a flatulent camel.

Willard White plays a tramp and, to his credit, is the only singer who succeeds in making the music sound musical. Even he has to put up with a cliché-ridden libretto. When he starts with the phrase "It is a day…" you just know that he is going to continue "…like any other day".