ROGER WATERS awoke yesterday to reviews judging him not as the famous co-founder of Pink Floyd but as an aspiring composer of opera.

Back in the summer the long-estranged Waters and Dave Gilmour played together for the first time in a quarter of a century, at the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park. This week Pink Floyd were inducted into the Hall of Fame at Alexandra Palace, with Waters taking part by satellite link from Rome.

His new incarnation is as composer of Ça Ira, a three-act opera about the French Revolution that took 16 years to write. The aim, he said, after the world premiere in Rome, remained to “create an emotional response”, and his inspiration came from Mahler, Brahms, Prokofiev, Verdi, Donizetti and Puccini. As Waters, 61, bounded on stage to greet the sell- out audience in Italian at Rome’s Music Auditorium, however — all open-necked shirt, craggy features and flowing silver hair — the standing ovation was as much for the rock legend as for Ça Ira.

“Waters is not so much Verdi or Puccini, more Andrew Lloyd Webber,” La Repubblica said. The opera was “eclectic” and derivative, with more “songs” than arias, and relentless crescendos in the style of Carl Orff. It was “like an elephant trying to take to the air with a small pair of wings”.

Yet what a bravura performance, said Il Messaggero, the Rome daily. It praised the staging and sound-effects, from cannon fire and the swish of the guillotine, to birdsong at Versailles and the ominous cawing of crows as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette approach their doom. A chorus of young voices — reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s The Wall — provides a poignant counterpoint.

Waters was philosophical: the knives had been bound to come out, and at least his work was “genuine”. He had been working on the opera since the bicentenary of the revolution, when his friends Etienne and Nadine Roda-Gil asked him to set their libretto to music. The theme, he said, was not unlike The Wall: despair and deprivation giving birth to hope and the human spirit.

Ça Ira (literally “It Will Go” but meaning something more like “There is Hope”) is clearly inspired as much by the Paris of 1968 as by the Paris of 1789. Waters met Etienne Roda-Gil — who wrote songs for Juliette Greco, among others — during the 1968 student revolt.

Ça Ira was performed by the Rome Sinfonietta, under Rick Wentworth, the cast including the British singers Sarah Leonard and Keel Watson.

As for Pink Floyd, a further reunion was very unlikely, even though he had enjoyed the Live 8 reunion, he said. At Alexandra Palace, Gilmour had been in similar mood: “The Live 8 moment was a wonderful moment, but we’ve moved on and there are lots of other things to be thrilled about these days.”

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