‘We don't have much control over the sounds that we make.’

A crowded restaurant on a Sunday lunchtime during the limbo between rehearsal and concert is not the best place or time in which to have an in-depth conversation with a composer. So Jonathan Dove, having just attended the final rehearsal of his oratorio There Was A Child for the Brighton Festival, sensibly suggested postponing the interview for this book so that he could devote quieter and more considered time to my questions. We talked at length three months later, in August 2011, in the large, airy living room of his east London flat.

He's that rare thing in the contemporary musical world: an opera composer, not a composer who writes the occasional opera. That's not the whole story, of course, because he has also written a large amount of choral music and some concert works – his Gaia Theory was given its first performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra during the 2014 Proms season. But the success of his operas Flight, Tobias and The Angel, The Adventures of Pinocchio and Mansfield Park has led him to be regarded first and foremost as a composer for the theatre. He has in fact written more operatic works than Puccini did, and I wanted to know why, at least at the beginning of his career, he established his musical home in the opera house rather than in the concert hall or recital room.

He was relaxed and affable, and on a personal level my encounter with him was easy and enjoyable. On the subsequent editorial level it was more demanding because of the transparency of his thought processes during the interview. At times he remained silent for several seconds while formulating an answer to one of my questions; at others he appeared to be audibly feeling his way through a response, as if testing whether his words were expressing sufficiently accurately what he wanted to say. This verbal hesitancy, which included a tendency to pause halfway through a sentence while working out how best to proceed, was of course a sign of his intellectual integrity, his refusal to express himself approximately or inaccurately, and a reflection of the seriousness with which he approached the interview.