WILL it be ready? That is the prudent question to ask when travelling to a long-planned opening of a new public building. Crossing the Volksgarten on the way to the opening of a new opera house in Linz, Austria, on April 11th, I noticed there were still cranes. Their sloping diagonals and brash colours cut rudely across the vertical lines of the building’s façade. Surely they had finished the outside at least? But the machinery, it transpired, was part of an elaborate set for a free, outdoor performance on the opening night of “Ein Parzival” (pictured above)—an abridged version of Wagner’s final opera, "Parsifal", by La Fura dels Baus, an enterprising Spanish theatre group. The largely airborne performance featured a 10-metre puppet hero, a heroine mounted on an enormous flying horse, and a legion of local hand-gliding enthusiasts dancing their way through the air (thanks to the cranes). Earlier, during the official opening ceremony inside the auditorium, the directors had intentionally pursued a “construction” gag. The first item on the programme—after the national anthem, sung in honour of Austria’s president, Heinz Fischer—was the prelude to the third act of Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier”, a preview of the company’s new production performed by the distinguished Bruckner Linz Orchestra under its American music director, Dennis Russell Davies. When the curtains opened, they revealed a building site. As the audience giggled, familiar characters from opera and ballet swarmed onto the stage to sweep away the hard hats.

“Ein Parzival” was free to the public, but the building was not. It has been completed to a budget of €180m ($237m), of which €170m came from the public purse. This sum of government funding is high, even by international standards, and extraordinary for a city of scarcely more than 200,000 inhabitants, at a time when almost every country in Europe is cutting back on its arts spending. "Culture costs, but the absence of culture costs much, much more", thundered Josef Pühringer, the governor of Upper Austria (the region for which Linz is the capital city), at the opening ceremony. Mr Pühringer has driven this project since its inception over a decade ago; his regional government provided half of the total funding, the federal government provided 20%, a further 25% came from the City authority and a final 5% from corporate sponsorship. A man with fierce, bright eyes and an angular face that could have been hewn from the nearby Alps, Mr Pühringer has governed Upper Austria since 1995. He also acts as the region’s finance and culture ministers simultaneously. He is well-placed to raise such investment, but the project has been a personal one too.

The Musiktheater am Volksgarten Linz—the opera house’s full name, intended to reflect its populist aspirations—is the culmination of a century's ambition, a decade's political battles, and five years' construction work. But the vintage of a political ambition is no sure guide to its virtue. Situated equidistant between Austria’s opera centres in Salzburg and Vienna, Linz’s house will need to work hard if it is to keep up. Whether Mr Pühringer is to be praised for his visionary leadership or censured for his profligacy depends on how well its various shows sell (the new house has 25% more capacity than the theatre where operas were previously staged) and on whether it becomes a destination for many, not just the moneyed social elite.

It was this latter aim—to create an egalitarian venue—that led to a bold proposition by Terry Pawson, a London-based architect. He suggested positioning the opera house directly on the Volksgarten (it was originally planned to be 100 metres away), which required the city’s principal thoroughfare to be rerouted to accommodate the new building. This idea won his firm the bid. The park and its surroundings used to be run down, lying a kilometre south of the Danube river where the main cultural buildings are clustered. But since they began building the opera house the area has been transformed. Empty apartments have been filled, and the city now has two centres of gravity, bringing a new buzz to the busy shopping street which joins them.