In the decades since its founding in 1920, the annual Salzburg Music Festival in Austria has earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the best—and priciest—summertime music venues in the world. The core repertory of the Festival has always been the music of Salzburg’s most famous native son, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and other classical and romantic masters from the Austro-Germanic tradition. Standards—and expenses—are high, and that often means risk-taking is discouraged.

Fearing that the Salzburg Festival was becoming a bit too conservative and predictable, in the 1990s the Festival’s directors began including some challenging contemporary classics into the mix.

On today’s date in 1997, a revised version of Gyorgy Ligeti’s opera “La Grand Macabre” premiered at the Salzburg Festival. It opens with a car-horn overture, and is a surreal, darkly whimsical vision of a post-modern world—set in a timeless never-never land inspired by the fantastic landscapes of the painters Franz Brueghel and Heronimous Bosch.

In Liegti’s opera, the world is fast approaching apocalypse, and the ultimate catastrophe is overseen by a rather ineffectual, and occasionally tipsy Grim Reaper. The libretto is silly and serious at the same time, and was devised by the composer and Michael Meschke, a master puppeteer. For the 1997 Salzburg production, the American director Peter Sellars set the work in a devastated Chernobyl-like landscape contaminated by a nuclear disaster.