WHEN Scottish Opera’s new production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos is performed at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal this month, audiences will also have the opportunity to see the latest fruits of the company’s commissioning of shorter new works that dates back a decade to the much praised Five:15 project. If the partnership of composer Stuart MacRae and writer Louise Welsh has become the most established of those brokered by Five:15, Glasgow-domiciled Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty also found a whole new direction in his writing life as a result of his participation.

Initially – and most regularly – with younger Northern Irishman Gareth Williams, also the composer on the National Theatre of Scotland’s acclaimed First World War works 306: Dawn and 306: Day, MacLaverty has become a sort of associate librettist-at-large for Scotland’s national opera company.

So the specific commission for a foyer space hors d’oeuvre to precede the main course of Ariadne in the theatre was not as odd as its individual ingredients might suggest.

“What seems to have happened,” says MacLaverty, “is that because Strauss cut the size of the orchestra, the company had ten players, five strings and five brass, twidding their thumbs. So [company general director] Alex Reedijk asked me to work with composer-in-residence Sam Bordoli to make something that combined them with a soprano he had in mind and a celebration of the spiral staircase that is at the heart of the new foyer.”

MacLaverty originally looked at his own short stories for something that might become an opera for ten-tet, soprano and spiral staircase, but that was before he had heard anything Bordoli had composed.

“When I heard Sam’s music – it was a piece he did in St Paul’s Cathedral with brass and a choir and lots of echoes – I thought of using the end of my novel Grace Notes.

“I’d wanted the book to end on an up-beat, so I had to have my composer character Catherine Anne McKenna achieve something, and I gave her an imaginary piece called Vernicle, which is broadcast throughout the Western world, as I have heard real concerts in Radio 3.”

The work MacLaverty imagined for his fictional composer had its roots in real music he had heard in Glasgow, including James MacMillan’s trumpet concerto Epiclesis and Edward McGuire’s Calgacus, which requires a Highland pipes soloist. For the Northern Irish McKenna, the bold ingredient was Lambeg drums.

“I don’t know what Sam has written, but I gave him a story line and some words. It will begin on floor three of the foyer with the composer nervous before the performance. She comes down the stairs and faces the promenading audience, there’ll be a red light go on and a BBC voice saying that her piece is coming after the interval.”

Soprano Catherine Backhouse, Scottish Opera’s Robertson Trust Emerging Artist, will be singing the role of McKenna and she will then tell the audience where the music comes from and the things that have influenced her in life.

“That all becomes part of the music, and you’ll hear the drums but not see them at first. The ‘now’ of the opera is the performance of the music, and as Ariadne also has musicians within the piece, it might be a good starter before the main course.”

It is a decade since MacLavety began his first short opera, with Gareth Williams. The King’s Conjecture was based on a story a school teacher had told him about an experiment supposedly conducted by James IV of Scotland about the origins of language.

“He is said to have put orphaned twins on a remote island in the care of a dumb wet nurse to find out what language they’d speak – his assumption being that it would be Hebrew, because that is the language of the Bible.”

“In that, the first one to walk on stage was the nurse, singing: ‘I am dumb’, which is the sort of thing opera can do. Opera soliloquises very easily, which is what Grace Notes will be too; it is the soprano telling us things at a moment of high emotional drama for her.”

In 2012 MacLaverty and Williams combined forces on an opera for young people, The Elephant Angel, which told the true story of a female zookeeper who saves a baby elephant at Belfast Zoo during the Blitz, and in Toronto they worked with singers from Canadian Opera as Scotland’s representative on a project to create an even briefer, more “instant” work, in just two days.

“From zero to an opera of five minutes in two days!” remembers MacLaverty. “The one I did there with Gareth used a wonderful short story of Iain Crichton Smith called The Telegram.”

The story, set in 1940, is of two women with sons away at the war who see the minister coming with a telegram, and, as he makes his way through the village, not stopping at other houses, they begin to wish the worst for each other.

“Gareth wrote it for two sopranos and it was like a banjo string, it was so tense, for the full five minutes.”

MacLaverty said that music came into his life in his teenage years, from the radio as he was studying for his A-levels, and then in the company of a group of close friends, who sound like the might have stepped from a Belfast-set staging of Puccini’s La Boheme.

“At the time I had a skiffle group, but I began to listen to stuff like Chopin. Joe, who was a painter, was really into opera, and he’d play us Caruso and Joan Sutherland on his wee Dansette. When we all went to Michael’s, who became a publisher, his family had much more sophisticated equipment.”

“I remember always going to the Messiah at Christmas and a conductor in the Ulster Hall, Rudolf Schwarz, with a sweep of white hair and a claw-hammer black coat. We were only able to afford the choir stalls, sitting facing him, which is something that people with money don’t see from the back of the hall.

“Then we applied to be walk-ons in the opera. Opera sometimes came to Belfast and I think that is where Pavarotti made his European debut. We were spear-carriers in Aida with our arms and legs browned and wee skirts. I think I have a feel for the ludicrousness of opera from those days.”

The publication of the novel Grace Notes led to MacLaverty becoming a classical music presenter on BBC Radio Scotland. Its subject matter produced an invitation to appear on composer Michael Berkeley’s Radio 3 version of Desert Island Discs, Private Passions, which in turn led to the offer of his own show, also entitled Grace Notes, on the Scottish station, on which he talked about music to other writers, including Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead and musicians like conductor Martyn Brabbins.

As well as two volumes of short stories, MacLaverty has published only one novel, The Anatomy School, in the 20 years between Grace Notes and last year’s unanimously-acclaimed Midwinter Break. Already destined to be made into a film, it is still keeping him busy; has he been surprised by its success?

“Oh, everybody who writes a book thinks it is good, or you wouldn’t do it,” he laughs. “That’s why you struggle your way through it.”

Director John Crowley, who filmed Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn and is currently working on Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, has the rights for the film version of Midwinter Break and MacLaverty has already completed a draft of the screenplay.

“I’ve broken the back of it, and I know what can be done and what can’t be. There are two principal characters and everything is internalised, so you have to treat it in a different way. It is as different from writing a novel as day and night. You’re telling the same story but you can’t do it the same way.”

Not dissimilar, then, from making the final pages of a novel into a short opera. And of course, MacLaverty had also given some thought to the soundtrack of the film as well.

“Music can be real and effective in cinema as it can’t be in literature. There are a few things I would like to hear that maybe transcribe the emotions the two people are going through.”

Grace Notes, by Samuel Bordoli and Bernard MacLaverty, will be performed by Catherine Backhouse at Theatre Royal, Glasgow at 6.30pm on March 22, 24 and 28.