The first time was the charm, even if that first time took decades to arrive.

Late last year the Houston Symphony earned its first ever Grammy Award nomination for best opera recording with "Berg: Wozzeck." Surprising almost everyone involved, the recording won the Grammy Sunday evening in New York.

"I'm rather quiet in these matters, but it's a huge, huge rewarding thing," said Hans Graf, the Houston Symphony's former music director and conductor, who planned two nights of performances of Alban Berg's "Wozzeck" as his farewell from the symphony in 2013. "And I'm so happy that it was a piece from off the beaten path. And that the Houston Symphony allowed it to happen and supported it."

Co-producer Brad Sayles, who engineered the recording, was in New York with Graf to receive the award.

"This feels very exciting right now," Sayles said, "especially with the city still recovering and rebuilding after the hurricane. First a World Series, and now a Grammy."

RELATED: Symphony recording engineer knew "Wozzeck" was a rare moment

Few involved with "Berg: Wozzeck" had high expectations for the recording at the Grammys. For starters, the symphony had not received a nomination since the awards were started in 1959. And Berg's opera - while celebrated upon its release in the 1920s - is a challenging piece of music that doesn't necessarily appeal to the widest swath of potential voters.

The recording extended beyond the symphony, too. The 2013 production of composer Alban Berg's now canonized opera required the work of a village of creative types from across Houston. The album was pulled from two performances in early 2013, part of the farewell for conductor Hans Graf, after a dozen years with the Houston Symphony.

"I was sure then it would be one of my most important contributions of 12 years," Graf said.

Now Playing:

But even then he didn't necessarily see it as a well-baited hook for industry awards. "This piece isn't like Mozart, where you see it done more often," he said. "It was out of the ordinary. So the success and the response has been extraordinary in every sense of the word."

The Grammy was preceded by another huge honor for the symphony; it received the prestigious ECHO Klassik award last fall in Germany.

Graf was also credited as producer for the album along with Sayles, who heard something special during rehearsals and rented additional equipment to make a better recording.

READ MORE: Beyonce wasn't the only local musician up for an award

In addition to the Houston Symphony, soloists Anne Schwanewilms and Roman Trekel, the chorus of students and alumni at Rice University's Shepherd School Of Music and the Houston Grand Opera Children's Chorus were cited.

"Of course I wasn't thinking about any award when we did this," Graf said. "I thought about doing a good thing with this wonderful piece of music, with the maximum knowledge and enthusiasm."

But Sayles, who has recorded every Houston Symphony performance for more than a decade for archival purposes, thought the artists involved were doing something special.

"Hans was so busy with the music, studying it, with all these years of work and preparation, he couldn't think about recording it," he said. "So that was my job. I wanted to make sure I captured it the best I could."

So more than 100 years after the Houston Symphony was founded, nearly a century after "Wozzeck" was written, about 60 years after the Grammy Awards were started and five years after the symphony struck an enduring version of Berg's opera, this ageless meditation on society and violence performed by a Texas symphony orchestra with other artists from the region won the top industry honor.