There was a real sense of occasion on Thursday evening before the opening performance of Melbourne Opera’s new production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, first performed in 1835, with a libretto by Salvatore Cammarano, based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Bride of Lammermoor (1819). Bagpipes summoned us along Collins Street. Inside, the Athenaeum Theatre seemed close to full.

Before the curtain rose, a representative of the company informed us, not that Lucia had tonsillitis or that Enrico, rogue that he is, had decamped to Wicked across the road in the Regent Theatre, but that it was twenty-one years since the company’s inaugural production: La Traviata (Stephen Smith, our speaker, with a voice ample as an auctioneer’s, was the Alfredo on that occasion).