On a sweltering Sydney day, Elena Kats-Chernin shelters in the air-conditioned comfort of her Coogee home, by necessity as much as by choice. Piles of discarded, hand-written musical scores spill on the floor around her feet as she sits at her trusty old Kawai upright piano, bought second-hand in 1994. With the vocal score for Whiteley, the new opera she's composing for Opera Australia (OA), due in a week, she's at the keys for pretty much 18 hours a day.

"I go to bed with it, I get up with it," she says, an animated rush of wild black hair, kohl-ringed eyes, glossy red lips and matching red-framed glasses. "I'm constantly running out of paper. I run out of pens too," she says, flashing her favourite line of calligraphy pens. "I use at least one a week."