There’s a lot of singing about love in English composer Jonathan Dove and librettist Alasdair Middleton’s The Enchanted Pig. Loud and clear, you hear love is a wonder, love is strange, and love is a drug. It can make you happy, a hero and a fool. For a princess in love with a pig who is actually a king under a spell that she sets out to break, it turns out that love, among many things, is a journey of patience, trust and perseverance. And it unfolds with the help of the North Wind, the Moon and the Sun, as well as the Milky Way, as part of a splendidly rendered staging by Gale Edwards in Gertrude Opera’s Australian premiere of the work at the Yarra Valley Opera Festival.

Naomi Flatman, Joshua Oxley, Sheridan Hughes, Yu Lin and Sam Roberts-Smith in The Enchanted Pig. Photos © Lyz Turner-Clark

The Enchanted Pig was first performed in London in 2006 to great success and went on to Broadway in 2011. Dove and Middleton’s two-act work, adapted from a Romanian folk tale with an immediate whiff of Beauty and the Beast about it, is a dense treasure of rolling...