As the Sydney Opera House celebrates its 50th birthday, its status as Australia’s premiere cultural institution remains unrivalled. Its hallowed halls have survived superstitions, lockdowns and celebrity showdowns, and played host to sopranos, sleepovers and symphonies. Outside, crowds have gathered in the shadows of its imposing white sails for an audience with both British and Hollywood royalty.
With the help of tour guides, security staff and stage managers, we take a look at five decades of moments that made Danish architect Jørn Utzon’s grand design pop with life.
Smoke signals
On 28 September 1973, muskets, cannons and 70-plus characters filled the Opera Theatre stage for Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace as the Opera House staged its first production a month before the venue’s official opening. It was 18-year-old Ivan Ginovic’s first opera, which he watched while eating pumpkin seeds, having just started work as an Opera House “fireman”, carrying an extinguisher. “Part of the insurance requirement was mobile firemen walking around, telling people not to smoke,” he explains.
Fifty years later Ginovic is still working as a theatre manager at the Opera House, presiding over a venue where old colonial ties have long vied with Australia’s own pre-invasion history and culture.
On a windy spring day on 20 October 1973, Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the venue, drawing an estimated 1 million people to the city’s streets. On 13 March 2006, she returned to open a colonnade, calling the Opera House “the symbol of the nation itself”; on this occasion, Ginovic had a chance to shake her hand, finding the Queen “graceful and charming”.
The Opera House stands on Bennelong Point, which was named after Woollarawarre Bennelong, who in 1789 was taken captive by Governor Arthur Phillip as an Aboriginal cultural go-between and later lived in a hut built for him on the site. But the Widjabul woman and former head of Indigenous programming Rhoda Roberts believes “Bennelong Point” is a misnomer. “Why would this site be called Bennelong Point when he was a Wangal man? This is Gadigal lands – so it wasn’t even his country, ” she says.
The Gadigal name for the site is Tubowgule, and the former tidal island has long been a place of gathering and cultural significance. A temporary installation featuring 85,000 oyster shells by the Quandamooka artist Megan Cope is on display in front of the Opera House in an acknowledgement of that traditional link.
Purple reign
Luciano Pavarotti performed arias with the Sydney-born soprano Dame Joan Sutherland in a gala concert in 1983 but a tour guide, Bruce Barnett, says the Italian tenor could not be persuaded to walk the “very theatrical, very royal, very high-church” purple carpet in the northern foyer – the colour, he insisted, was unlucky, a coffin-lining hue.
According to Barnett, as Pavarotti exited an elevator for a media conference and saw the purple carpet, he declined to go any further, heading back to his dressing room. So the conference was hastily moved to the foyer of what is now known as the Joan Sutherland theatre – where the carpet is a glorious red.
Pavarotti had many superstitions: he would hold a large white handkerchief on stage as a security blanket, and pop a bent nail in his pocket for luck. Such rituals are “consistent with a lot of people’s behaviour in theatre”, Barnett says.
Every theatre has at least one ghost, according to the Opera House’s technical integration manager and former head of lighting, Ange Sullivan. A couple of times in the Joan Sutherland Theatre, about 1am after changing the set for Puccini’s opera La Bohème, Sullivan has seen a “quite benevolent” ghost in the audience seats, at the back of the circle, “in the gods”. Each time it was at the end of her 14-hour shift.
“It was this shadowy figure that looks like an old man, hanging around the back of the auditorium,” she says, recalling his “possibly masculine” facial features. “I choose to believe it’s some sort of energy that’s looking over and making sure everyone’s safe, maybe a bit interested in what everyone’s doing.”
Other workers claim to have seen a ghost too, she says, including a former colleague who insisted he also saw an old man in the furthest audience box. Perhaps the ghost of Jørn Utzon, who died in 2008? “Why not,” Sullivan says with a laugh. “It’s as good a theory as any.”
During the Covid-19 lockdowns, the Opera House revived a centuries-old theatrical tradition of ghost lights. A stand was placed on the edge of each stage, on to which a single, energy-efficient bulb glowed. A ghost light is meant to ensure no one falls into the orchestra pit – but it might also sate apparitions who once trod the boards.
La Stupenda lives on
One night Ginovic recalls escorting Sutherland and her husband, the orchestra maestro Richard Bonynge, to the artists’ green room. “In the middle of nowhere, a man came in and went down on his knees and asked for forgiveness,” Ginovic recalls. “He kept saying, ‘Please, please, please, forgive me.’”
Ginovic believes the man was a music teacher who had prevented Dame Joan winning a competition years earlier. “She said, ‘Please, don’t feel bad, I don’t remember anything about that.’ She helped him get up off the floor and assured him there were no hard feelings.”
There was less mercy from the pop diva Dionne Warwick when an audience member whipped out a camcorder and began filming her Opera House concert in 2004. “Ladies and gentleman, I’m stopping the show,” Warwick announced, according to a tour guide, Peter Sekules, who was then seated in the concert hall front row.
“There was this deathly silence, and she looked at this guy and said, ‘Can I have your camcorder?’” Sekules recalls. “She took out the tape and proceeded with the show.” Warwick has held to her ideals of audience etiquette, continuing to seize mobile phones.
Oprah House
The former police detective Jenny Muldoon joined the Opera House in 2010, where that December she shared an elevator with US television royalty in the form of Oprah Winfrey, who was at the venue to record two of the final episodes of her eponymous talkshow. Winfrey greeted Muldoon with “Hey girl! So what’s your job here?”
Muldoon informed Winfrey she was head of security. “She goes, ‘Noooo waaaay! A female as head of security!’ She gives me a hug and a kiss and she locks her arm in mine, and we walk out of the lift and she says to our CEO, ‘She’s so cool!’”
Winfrey filmed her star-studded daytime shows in the Opera House forecourt in a spectacle that involved celebrities including Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Bono and Hugh Jackman, who famously copped a black eye while attempting a Wolverine-style stage entrance on a flying fox.
Jackman had rehearsed the stunt several times that day (his injury was minor). “He said he just got so excited,” Muldoon says. “He didn’t pull the emergency lever brake in time.” Views of the footage went viral, rivalling new year’s eve coverage of the globally renowned site.
Somnolent symphony
The greatest compliment audiences could pay German British composer and pianist Max Richter’s eight-hour overnight concerts in 2016 was to nod off. Two hundred cots were laid out as Richter’s lullaby composition Sleep filled the northern foyer from 11pm to 7am. In a five-star Guardian Australia review, Kate Hennessy wrote that Richter aimed to “nurture the sleeping brain”.
The sleepover at the Opera House was logistically tricky: slippers, dressing gowns, eye masks and snack packs were provided, and supper and breakfast served. The effect was “hotel room meets a long-haul flight meets a concert”, says the head of contemporary music, Ben Marshall.
From dusk to dawn, people were washed with music, “forever in this liminal state” of drifting off or waking, he says. “It ended up being one of the most numinous experiences of my life.”
