It premiered at the Dutch National Opera on 2 November 1994 in a production co-directed by Greenaway and Saskia Boddeke.
They had discussed the idea of collaborating on a film or opera with Greenaway initially suggesting The Baby of Mâcon which Andriessen rejected.
[4] The opera tells the story of Juan Manuel de Rosa, a fictitious Argentine composer who writes film scores for Westerns, and is murdered in Uruguay.
Rosa falls in love with his horse while mistreating his fiancée, Esmeralda Boscano, who is constantly writing to her mother about these events.
The Gramophone's Rob Cowan noting the opera's "lack of compromise, its snorting aggression"[7] The Sunday Times wrote that Andriessen had "..developed an idiom in which minimalism, a distinct sort of rhythmic Stravinsky-ism and mainstream modernism are blended with masterful, totally personal ease.."[8] Greenaway made a film version in 1999, though it was not shown in the United States until a 2004 premiere at the Walter Reade Theater in New York City.