From early days, Glyndebourne has been more than a matter of Mozart, picnics and champagne. Since 1946, when Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia was premiered there, it has presented its elegantly attired audience with challenging new works, including a dozen commissions. Twelve in 64 years may not be an unduly high return, but their quality has been striking, among them a Tippett work, two by Birtwistle and a Knussen double bill. The latest is by the Hungarian Peter Eotvos (born 1944). He is better known here as a conductor, mainly of new music, has often appeared with the London Sinfonietta and BBC Symphony Orchestra, and for years headed the Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain. Several of his pieces have, though, been heard in London, and indicate that, for all his attachment to Boulez (founder of that Parisian group) and Stockhausen (with whom he studied), his approach is not to be pinned down to any doctrinaire modernism.

The orchestral zeroPoints, the jazz-affiliated trumpet concerto Jet Stream (both performed at the Barbican) and especially the orchestral Chinese Opera (some of which was aired last year as part of the Philharmonia’s Music of Today series at the Festival Hall) reveal a mentality that seems, as he says himself, primarily theatrical. Chinese Opera is wordless and not particularly oriental-sounding, but operatic gesture is implanted in the instrumental lines themselves. Eotvos even sees them as a commentary on the techniques of various 20th-century theatre directors. This is not purist, high-toned writing, but adaptable and eclectic, with a rough-and-readiness essential to the theatre. As the Glyndebourne dramaturge Edward Kemp’s programme essay observes, Eotvos cheerfully admits that he has no style of his own. He composes the “style” along with the actual notes — an eminently practical method for turning out operas or, as he has also often done, film scores.

He has now written eight operas, including the adaptation from plays of The Three Sisters, Le Balcon and Angels in America, but the new one is the first to be produced in this country. Love and Other Demons is based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1994 novel Of Love and Other Demons. Losing the “of” is appropriate to a work that presents rather than describes. The libretto, mostly in English, by Kornel Hamvai, in association with Kemp, condenses the action into two parts, 80 and 60 minutes long, with a formal crispness in contrast to the torrid emotions on display.

The story is horrible. In 18th-century Spanish Colombia, a 12-year-old girl, Sierva Maria, the daughter of Marquis Don Ygnacio, but reared by an African slave, Dominga, is bitten by a rabid dog at the time of a solar eclipse. Whether she acquires the disease is not ascertained (she behaves strangely), but the bishop is sure she has been possessed by demons and sends her to a convent for exorcism. His librarian, Delaura, is given responsibility for her “salvation”, but, partially blinded by looking at the sun during the eclipse, he is fully blinded by her beauty, and possessed by the worst of demons, erotic love. There is nothing he can do to save her, though; and, after much bloodstained religious writhing, her exorcism is complete and she expires. Religious bigotry has prevailed over the pagan vitality of the slaves, passion has flailed uselessly, love has achieved nothing.

There is, perhaps, traditional operatic potential in this lurid melodrama, but Eotvos is modernist enough not to want to develop it. His concerns seem to be, more abstractly, with manipulating stage time, with stereophony in the pit — where the orchestra is split symmetrically in two (the effect passed me by, alas, at the back of the stalls) — and with ciphering Sierva’s name into the score, rather as Berg encodes the names Schoenberg and Webern in his Chamber Concerto. For all Eotvos’s stylistic adaptability — the sharp snatches of African or Spanish pastiche, the obligingly free-floating accompaniments — he is reluctant to leave behind modern opera’s lingua franca and lift the discourse out of continuous arioso (however nuanced) into full-blooded aria, or risk more than a hint of ensemble (though there are deft, atmospheric choruses). As a result, the dramatic high points seemed to me to lose emotional reality.

When Delaura brings the first part to a close with a desperate soliloquy of erotic enthralment, I longed for some lyrical efflorescence of the vocal line, but the jagged outburst — though sturdily projected by the baritone Nathan Gunn — only made me more aware that his lovesickness had come on suddenly, with scant dramatic preparation. In the second part, Delaura and Sierva do have the generic love scene, but manage to sing together only in the last few bars.

I was most surprised to read, in Kemp’s essay, that Eotvos saw the opera as an opportunity for bel canto. True, Sierva is a coloratura role, and one of fearsome difficulty, but strident expressionism is privileged over vocal display. The Australian Allison Bell’s way with the part was, however, a great strength of the evening. Another was Felicity Palmer’s formidable if sympathetic abbess.

The orchestral writing comes to a noisy climax in the exorcism scene, which stirs memories of Ken Russell’s film The Devils with its creepily insidious and, as such, more effective music by Maxwell Davies, and there isn’t much of the opera after that. Dominga (Marietta Simpson) sings a free-rhythm lament for her “baby” and, in this staging by Silviu Purcarete, Don Ygnacio (Robert Brubaker) silently watches as his daughter descends to her grave. Altogether, one wanted more: more logical thrust to the drama, more effulgence in the vocal parts, more autonomy in the orchestra, which offers no real argument of its own.

One couldn’t fault the conductor, Vladimir Jurowski, or the playing of the London Philharmonic. Helmut Sturmer’s set, a crumbling, silver-grey, all-purpose interior overlain by Andu Dumitrescu’s video projections of a carnal and zoological nature, is stylish enough. The opera is cleanly crafted and not without its gleaming moments, and is meant as a tribute to the house and voices for which it was written, bearing their imprint like a cast out of a mould. Yet, sitting through Puccini’s Il Tabarro at the Proms next day — a stirring concert performance by the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda — I knew with extra force what I’d been missing.

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