on the shores of the Oslo Fjord on Saturday, kicking off a gala performance before royalty, national leaders and music lovers. The Nordic nation's newest landmark, a stunning 4.2 billion kroner (US$840 million; euro525 million) white marble building, fulfills a more than 120-year dream for Norwegian music fans, used to watching the Norwegian Opera and Ballet in old downtown theaters.
The two-and-a-half hour opening performance covered historical highlights of opera and ballet, before an audience that included Norway's Queen Sonja, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Danish Queen Margrethe and about 1,350 invited guests greeted by a children's choir.
"Innermost in the Oslo Fjord, the opera house rises as a new and monumental landmark," said King Harald in declaring the opera open. "This house for many generations to come will be filled with music, dance and song."
Opera director Bjoern Simonsen said: "This is a building that will change the way the world sees us, and the way we see ourselves."
The opening included performances by singers Maria Guleghina, Anja Harteros, Solveig Kringlebotn and Elizabeth Norberg-Schulz, and Rene Pape as well as by the national ballet. The white stone of the opera seems to rise from the water of the fjord, and the sloping stone roof, made up of 36,000 fitted pieces, was designed to allow visitors to walk up the gentle incline to view the city and the fjord from the top.
The inside has been lined with crafted woodwork, and decorated with art worth about 60 million kroner (US$12 million; euro7.5 million).
Plans to open the new building with the specially written opera "Around the World in 80 Days" were dropped because necessary stage and lighting equipment was delivered too late. That opera will instead be performed next year.
The Norwegian parliament's decision to approve construction and funding of a national opera ended more than 120 years of debate and waiting for the new building. It also belatedly confirmed an overly optimistic 1881 report in an Oslo newspaper that the capital was about to get a new opera house.
According to Snoehette, the Oslo architects who designed the building, the roughly 1,000- room Opera, including one 1,350-seat and one 400-seat auditoriums, is the largest cultural building raised in Norway in 700 years, when the Nidaros Cathedral was completed in the city of Trondheim in about 1300.
The opera was built at Bjoervika, near where the Vikings founded the original Oslo 1,000 years ago.
