The Opera House’s repertoire extended far beyond opera, ballet, symphonic music and theatre with performances of jazz, including Sammy Davis Jnr in 1977 and Ella Fitzgerald in 1978, as well as a wide variety of pop and rock shows. The Old Tote Theatre – later the Sydney Theatre Company – moved into the Drama Theatre.īy the Opera House’s second year, new Australian works included The Australian Opera’s staging of Peter Sculthorpe’s Rites of Passage and The Australian Ballet’s performance of Barry Moreland’s Sacred Space. The Music Room – now the Utzon room – was home to Musica Viva, the chamber music organisation set up in the 1940s by a Hungarian refugee to meet the burgeoning demand for classical music from European migrants. The first performance in the Concert Hall was a program of works by Wagner performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and featuring the legendary Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson and conductor Charles Mackerras. On 28 September 1973, almost a month before its official opening by Her Majesty the Queen, the curtain in the Opera Hall rose on its first production: Prokofiev’s epic War and Peace, performed by the Australian Opera. In 1960, before the construction of the sails had even begun, American singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson climbed the scaffolding and sang Ol’ Man River to construction workers. The urgency was also underlined by the fact that the first performance at the Sydney Opera House occurred long before the building had even been finished. Its construction was a bold, visionary exercise in nation-building by a young, largely immigrant nation looking to define itself. The Opera House was born of an urgent need for new creative expression. To others, its perfection was forever compromised by the manner of its completion.īut on 20 October a building conceived with vast ambitions - nothing less than to “help mould a better and more enlightened community”, in the words of then New South Wales Premier Joseph Cahill - a building that some would say had already begun to do that work during the travails and controversies of its construction - began to assume its destiny. Some had feared that the Sydney Opera House might never be finished. It was a day that brought to a conclusion the saga of the building’s conception, design and construction, a saga in which controversies and politics upended what had seemed for many years as idealistic a quest for architectural perfection as had been seen in the post-war world. The Queen’s words could not have been more appropriate to the occasion. Ben Blakeney, a direct descendant of Bennelong, appeared silhouetted at the apex of one of the high roof sails to welcome the public to the Opera House.