40 and fabulous: Sydney Opera House
As the Sydney Opera House celebrates a landmark birthday, Stephen Lacey gets a behind-the-scenes look at an Australian icon
"Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music," according to German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He wasn't referring to the Sydney Opera House, of course, but if he had been born in 1949 instead of 1749, he could well have been.
The sculptural tour de force that has become not only a symbol of the emerald city itself, but of Australia as a whole, turns 40 today. On October 20, 1973, Queen Elizabeth II declared the opera house open, before taking a seat for a performance of Beethoven's 9th symphony, played by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Next Sunday, the same symphony will ring out across the forecourt in a twilight anniversary concert featuring soloists from Opera Australia and the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs. The concert will be attended by Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary of Denmark.
It was a Danish architect, Jorn Utzon, who, in 1957, won the competition to design an opera house on Sydney's Bennelong Point. The story goes that one of the judges, Eero Saarinen, spotted entry No218 in a pile of already rejected designs and declared it the winner. The rest, as they say, is history.
In truth, the story of how the landmark got built is a long and bitterly political one that saw Utzon resign from the project following an argument with the New South Wales government over money to pay his staff and for the plywood prototypes of the interiors. It would be another seven years - taking the project a decade past its original projected completion date - and a cost blowout to A$102 million (the original estimate had been A$7 million) - before the opera house would be ready to host its first performance.