Rushdie fielded questions and discussed his book with Joseph and Perla throughout the adaptation process. I hope that he's going to be okay with that.'' it was very frightening to think to myself, 'Wow, so this part's going to be cut. So especially when you're talking about this as a hero of mine.

'It's almost 600 pages long and it has so many characters and so many stories and they're so beautifully intertwined, and part of what makes it this work of genius is all of those things balancing on one another. ' Shalimar the Clown is a sweeping novel,' Joseph says. It was a daunting task for Joseph, particularly given how much he respects Rushdie. You need to write words and sentences that are as limited and short and small as possible.' 'It's almost like writing a haiku in terms of the words on the page,' Joseph says. Playwright Rajiv Joseph was commissioned to whittle the novel down to a libretto. 'It cannot be narrative like a novel because it takes twice to three times as long to sing any particular phrase as it does to say it. 'Opera is character-driven,' says pianist and composer Jack Perla, who wrote the score to Shalimar. 'It feels in a way more topical than it did when I wrote it,' says Salman Rushie, who wrote the 2005 novel on which the Shalimar the Clown opera is based. So the former clown becomes a terrorist assassin. The dead man is a former American ambassador who stole Shalimar's true love.

The man with the knife is Shalimar, who was once a clown with a traditional traveling performance troupe. 'That was the starting point of the story, and then I really, literally, had to work out who those people were.' 'I just found myself thinking every day of this image of a murder scene in Los Angeles, with a dead man on the ground and a man standing over him with a knife, and the dead man's daughter in the house just behind,' Rushdie says. Rushdie says the novel sprang from one tragic image.

Adapted by composer Jack Perla and Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Rajiv Joseph, the opera premieres tonight at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. There's intrigue, violence, and conflict between tradition and modern society - the sort of stuff that makes for grand opera. Published in 2005, it tells the story of a young man who seeks revenge after he's jilted by the love of his life.

Shalimar the Clown is Salman Rushdie's eighth novel. Soprano Andriana Chuchman and tenor Sean Panikkar in a scene from Shalimar the Clown.

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