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Opera, which touches on every commandment and sin described in any holy book but adds great music and theater, is my religion. When a new opera house opens, I’m there. And if that new Valhalla is in Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Denmark) or its spikily independent Nordic cousin, Finland, I have even more motivation to go: The design is sure to be extraordinary and up-to-the-minute.

The talk of the opera world is the Norwegian firm Snøhetta’s brandnew Den Norske Opera, which opened in Oslo last April. With its prominent position in the harbor and its fascinatingly idiosyncratic design, this building is expected to do for Oslo what the Guggenheim Museum did for Bilbao and the Sydney Opera House did for Australia’s largest city. Snøhetta’s house is so inventive and welcoming that even people who know nothing about opera will travel to Norway to see it.

When I was invited to be a speaker about classical music on the aptly named Crystal Symphony, I leapt at the opportunity not only to sail on that elegant ship but also to use our calls in the ports of Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Stockholm to visit the musical cathedrals of the North. The Nordic countries see their opera houses as expressions of their egalitarian values and their love of design, in which form and function are as inextricably linked as words and music are in opera.

Many of opera’s great singers have come from the Nordic countries. Sweden is probably the number one exporter of them. Legendary artists such as Jenny Lind, Birgit Nilsson, Elisabeth Söderström, Jussi Björling, Set Svanholm, Nicolai Gedda, Gösta Windbergh, and Ingvar Wixell have modern contemporaries in Anne Sofie von Otter, Katarina Dalayman, Nina Stemme, Peter Mattei, and Hakan Hagegard, who all reign on the world’s most important stages. With Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior, Norway and Denmark combined to give Wagner lovers the best soprano-tenor pairing ever. Finland, a young country (independence came in 1917) with a deeply rooted opera tradition, turns out an astonishing number of world-class opera singers, conductors, and composers. Soprano Karita Mattila, known as the Finnish Venus, drives audiences wild with her thrilling singing and Oscar-caliber acting.

Although Norway produced Scandinavia’s greatest painter (Munch) and playwright (Ibsen) and one of its finest composers (Edvard Grieg, who didn’t write any operas), it doesn’t have a deep opera tradition. The Norwegian National Opera wasn’t founded until 1959, and before the opening of the new opera house, the company performed in a cinema. I saw Tosca there once, and the space was deficient in almost every way.

When the Crystal Symphony sailed into Oslo on a clear day in June, I went to the top deck and saw, right in the harbor, the astonishing sight of what looked like a snow-covered ski jump with a glass-and-wood column crashing through the middle of it. The Norske Opera is as much a landscape as a building in that it invites people, and even expects them, to climb on the roof. By being on top of the building, the reasoning goes, the people will feel ownership of it. “With this new building, which anyone can walk through or on top of, something phenomenal has happened,” says Tom Remlov, the house’s chief executive. “Overnight it became the possession and the pride of the entire nation.”

A product of a collaboration among exterior and interior architects, landscape architects, and visual artists, the building is a collective expression of Norwegian identity—and, at $840 million, its wealth. Scenery shops and rehearsal rooms are transparent, so passersby can observe the work that’s being partly funded by their government.

The building comprises an eclectic mix of materials. Some lobby benches are covered in gray sheepskin. One lobby wall is made of aluminum. Poles for hanging coats—unguarded in a nation where there’s a common sense of trust—double as torchiere lamps. Beautiful glass elevators receive external light. Some interior hallways are Ferrari red. The auditorium’s outer walls are carved oak, giving the sense that a tree is growing in the lobby amid the glass and marble. There are 1,369 red velour seats. The upper part of the auditorium is surrounded by a glass cube that soars through the marble roof, making the auditorium’s exterior visible to anyone who’s up there for a climb.