For the first time in over a century an Irish composer had a full-scale opera with orchestra première at a major opera house in London.
Gerald Barry's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, which opened the English National Opera's (ENO) new season at The Coliseum on Friday, is the successor to Charles Villiers Stanford's Much Ado About Nothing, which was first seen at Covent Garden in 1901.
The avalanche of publicity surrounding the ENO performance was hard to miss. The target audience strayed well outside the norms for an opera production. ENO's advertisement in this week's Time Out magazine - accurately identifying key themes as "sexual desire/ dominance/submission" - was placed in the gay and lesbian and in the film sections rather than under classical and opera.
Commentators had been speculating about "hot girl-on-girl action" in Barry's word-for-word setting of German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play.
The Sunday Times couldn't resist a dig about ENO's troubled history with a headline suggesting "singing lesbians to rescue opera house".
ENO's chief executive and artistic director, Derryman Seán Doran, was clearly on a high.
"I think it's turned out to be one of the great achievements of modern opera. People coming out were absolutely blown away."
Irish ambassador Dáithí Ó Ceallaigh held a pre-performance reception at the Irish Embassy in Grosvenor Place. Although more a jazz man than an opera buff, he was thoroughly won over by music and production alike.
Susanna Eastburn, former artistic director of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, which presented Act II of the opera in concert in 2002, said: "It's like no other opera I've ever seen. I was completely gripped by it."
Niall Doyle, director of music at RTÉ, which shared the commissioning of the opera with ENO and has already issued last May's concert première on CD, said the evening was "a triumph".
Barry was so lionised by well-wishers at the post-performance party that, pumping flesh and accepting compliments - including one from a member of the all-female cast who declared working on the opera to be "the most outstanding experience" of her career - he never made it past the top of the stairs.
Fassbinder's original Petra, Margit Carstensen, was at the opening night, as was Juliane Lorenz, director of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation. The composer made them a gift of pages from his manuscript of the score.
Garret FitzGerald was at the festivities before and after the performance. His son-in-law, Vincent Deane, wrote the libretto for Barry's first opera The Intelligence Park, and also suggested Petra as a viable operatic subject to the composer. Apparently the former Taoiseach deemed the subject matter of Petra too X-rated for a young grand-daughter, and went with her to Les Miserables.
The gathering at The Coliseum included artists Dorothy Cross, Anthony Gormley and Howard Hodgkin; actors Steven Berkoff, Fiona Shaw and Juliet Stevenson; writers John Banville and Colm Toibín; Abbey Theatre artistic director Fiach MacConghail; composers Deirdre Gribbin, Anthony Hamilton and Mícheál Ó Suilleabháin; and BBC proms director Nicholas Kenyon.
