Is there anything we don’t know about Rufus Wainwright? He’s constantly being interviewed or singing his autobiographical songs about rehab and falling in and out of love, and his “story” is so well known that there are quite a lot of people who know much more about the man than the music. There’s his precocious childhood (he first performed at the age of 6) divided between America and the French part of Canada. His close but at times strained relationship with his parents, the folk singers Loudon Wainwright and Kate McGarrigle, who divorced when Rufus was 3, and didn’t like it very much when he told them that he was gay. His promiscuous early adolescence; the brutal rape in Hyde Park at 14 that pitched
Rufus Wainwright’s first opera, Prima Donna
Who would be the best contemporary musician to write an opera for the masses? The cheerfully immodest singer-songwriter has a clear idea