The Sydney Opera House turned 60 yesterday – and the event was feted in style on its famous steps with artistic director Lyndon Terracini joined by 60 opera singers in full costume for champagne, pink cup cakes and a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
Celebration was the order of the day as Opera Australia unveiled its 2016 season, a highly eclectic affair which kicks off with the multi-Helpmann award-winning production of The Rabbits (based on John Marsden and artist Shaun Tan’s picture book.)
In a major coup for the House, it was also announced that Dame Julie Andrews (the original Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle) will be flying out to Sydney to direct a new production of My Fair Lady, premiering at the Sydney Opera House in August 2016. Lyndon Terracini also confirmed that next year’s Handa Opera on the Harbour will be Puccini’s Turandot, directed by Chen Shi-Zheng, a Chinese artist who grew up during the Cultural Revolution and was taken in by a Chinese opera troupe.
Forget the glitz and glamour of Puccini’s opera – which Opera Australia describes as taking place “in an exotic world where fear and love go hand in hand and death is always just around the corner.” The opera company’s 2016 season includes a story of betrayal and political skullduggery which lies much closer to home. The highlight of 2016 is set to be Sydney Opera House: the opera, a reworked and renamed version of Alan John and Dennis Watkins’ 1995 hit, The Eighth Wonder, which tells the age-old Sydney tale of budget overruns, political infighting and the shock resignation of Danish architect Jørn Utzon that almost halted construction of the Opera House back in the ‘60s.
BBC World Service podcast on The Troubled History of the Sydney Opera House
Sydney Opera House: the opera, which will be mounted on the steps of the Opera House for just five performances in October and November 2016, is set to delight opera buffs and architecture aficionados alike. There is drama a-plenty in the story of the Opera House’s construction. Legend has it that Utzon’s original sketches of its famous sails ended up in the reject pile when judges launched an international competition to find an architect to build an opera house on Bennelong Point. Utzon’s design was allegedly only plucked out of the slush pile at the last minute by the late-arriving American judge Eero Saarinen.
Utzon’s architectural dream was plagued by government wrangling over the years and the construction of the Opera House became almost as controversial as the design itself, with building work taking more than a decade. It took more than three years just to complete the design for the glazed ceramic tiles that make up each of the house’s shells – and a further eight years to build the shell structure (one of the most difficult engineering tasks ever to be attempted.)
Successive budget blow-outs culminated in the Liberal works minister, Davis Hughes, seizing financial control of the project in 1965. The following year Utzon quit, telling Sir Davis, ”You do not respect me as an architect.” He left Australia immediately, never getting the chance to realise his design vision for the building’s interior and never returning to see his finished masterpiece.
Sydney Opera House: the opera stands as a fitting tribute to Utzon’s architectural vision that turns out to have been way ahead of its time.
Julie Street 