At least they tried. With no subsidy, Glyndebourne has every reason to steer clear of modern opera. But inspired by music director Vladimir Jurowski’s flair for the new as well as the old, the Sussex house commissioned Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös to write Love and Other Demons.

The result – an adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s steamy 1994 novella – is another nail in the coffin of opera as a living, breathing art form. Eötvös set himself an impossible task. He chose a book so drenched in mystic realism, so rich in colour and flavour, so racy in its appeal to the imagination, that you wonder how he ever thought music could add something. It would take a genius to make an opera of it. Eötvös is merely a good composer. His music, more concerned with timbre than drama, draws the sting out of Márquez’s characters. The pace is glacial, the vocal lines laden with meditative arioso. This is more a musical fantasy in the idiom of the 1980s avant-garde than an opera of the 21st century.

It’s odd that Eötvös should alight on such an old-fashioned operatic subject – obsessive, forbidden love – and then choose a librettist, Kornél Hamvai, with no experience of opera. Instead of homing in on the relationship between Sierva Maria, the bewitching girl accused of devil possession, and Cayetano Delaura, the priest sent to investigate her, the libretto treats all characters equally (Sierva Maria’s mother, one of the most operatic figures in the book, is omitted). It also neuters Márquez’s suggestiveness. In the novel, the young priest first sees Sierva Maria in a dream – hence his fascination for her. In the opera he simply meets her and tells the bishop. The magic element is lost.

Glyndebourne’s production, staged by Silviu Purcarete with designs by Helmut Stürmer and projections by Andu Dimitrescu, has splashes of conventional operatic colour. Jurowski and the London Philharmonic handle Eötvös’s filaments of sound with staggering finesse. Allison Bell conquers Sierva Maria’s stratospheric flights, while Nathan Gunn’s Cayetano Delaura is opera’s answer to Hollywood casting. Felicity Palmer, Jean Rigby, John Graham-Hall, Robert Brubaker and Marietta Simpson make what they can of ungrateful parts. At least they all tried.