Rufus Wainwright at the piano working on his opera, Prima Donna. (Kevin Westenberg/Luminato)Montreal singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright will see the North American premiere of his opera Prima Donna Monday night, followed immediately by the beginning of his solo tour of Canada and the U.S.

He's particularly excited over the opening of Prima Donna, which he has rewritten since receiving scathing reviews in Britain, where it opened last year in Manchester and London.

"Toronto really come to bat to me over past few years with this piece," Wainwright said in an interview Monday with CBC's Q cultural affairs show. "There were moments when the opera was in dire straits, and the people from Luminato rushed in and saved it."

Luminato's support helped when New York's Met backed out of producing the opera early in its development, saying it didn't want a French-language opera.

The production he brings to Toronto has a new conductor, Netherlands-born Robert Houssart and a new director, Tim Albery of Toronto. Albery, who has worked with the Canadian Opera Company, also staged The Children's Crusade, a hit at last year's Luminato.

He's hoping the critics are kinder than they were for the Manchester and London premieres.

In retrospect, Wainwright realized he'd opened Prima Donna in front of some of the toughest critics on earth, he said.

Romantic opera

The diva played by Janis Kelly is charmed by a young reporter in Prima Donna. (CBC)"Certain critics were accepting and interested and gave me good pointers and thought I'd overreached in some places, but there were others who were just livid at what I was doing and thought I'd done the most profane act imaginable," he said.

Wainwright said he thought he'd taken a beating in part because he came from a pop background, but also because he chose to do a romantic opera at a time when more overtly political pieces, such as John Adams's Nixon in China, are considered more contemporary.

Prima Donna is set in Paris in 1970 and follows a day in the life of an aging opera singer who has been away from the stage for six years and is pondering a comeback.

Wainwright said he had in mind opera singers of the '50s and '60s, such as Maria Callas and Jesse Norman.

"These women, they don't sing modern opera. They only do romantic opera," he said. "The critics didn't understand that this character, the prima donna, this is her universe."

The singer-songwright admits he also incorporated incidents from his own life and that of his sister, singer Martha Wainwright, and his famous mother Kate McGarrigle, who died earlier this year.

Partly about his mother

A scene when a young, handsome reporter presses the prima donna to reveal herself is based on incidents in his own life, when he's been caught with defences down, Wainwright said.

"Later on in the opera, when she is deciding whether or not to continue with her career after emotional and physical strife … that was very much about my mother. Dealing with your body failing," he said.

McGarrigle battled cancer for several years, but was able to see the British premiere of Prima Donna during a brief respite from chemotherapy.

Wainwright credits his folk singer mother, one half of the McGarrigle sisters, with introducing him to opera.

"One night she came home with a copy of Verdi's Requiem. We listened to the whole piece — her, me, and Anna was there as well — and by the end of it, I was completely hooked," he recalled.

A documentary about the making of the opera captures Wainwright in his teens, singing along to Tosca. That documentary, Rufus Wainwright: Prima Donna airs Monday night on Bravo.

If the London critics were harsh with Wainwright's first opera, they were unhesitantly positive about his tour of Europe in support of his album All Days are Nights: Songs for Lulu. Wainwright begins a North American leg of the tour Tuesday with two shows in Toronto.

He will perform in Montreal and Sainte-Foy, Que., before going on to dates in New York, Los Angeles and later in the year, Australia and New Zealand.