Pink Floyd's The Wall to be staged by Opéra de Montréal

The Opéra de Montréal is turning Pink Floyd's The Wall into an opera for its 2016-2017 season to mark the city's 375th anniversary. 

Roger Waters, a founding member of Pink Floyd, joined Opéra de Montréal representatives to announce its new season and comment on The Wall being turned into an opera during a news conference Thursday.

Waters told a news conference in Montreal that at first he wasn't interested in participating in the opera's season.

"I think my reply was somewhat dismissive," Waters said of the first time he was approached for the project. 

"It had been my experience that experiments in collaboration between the worlds of rock and roll and the worlds of symphonic music were generally disastrous and should be embarked upon with extreme trepidation. But they were extremely persuasive," he added.

"[They] played me some midi of what they had been working on and I confess, I sat there not expecting to be moved, and I was moved. Very moved. So I approach this project with great enthusiasm."

At the news conference, Waters was asked to comment on whether returning to Montreal was difficult after the infamous spitting incident in 1977, where he spit on a fan trying to storm the Olympic Stadium stage.

"The Wall is about the journey from the enmity of spitting in someone's face to the position where love becomes more important than that enmity," Waters said.

Organizers say The Wall album was partly inspired by Pink Floyd's 1977 performance at Montreal's Olympic Stadium.

"It was in our beautiful city, 40 years ago, that Mr. Waters' The Wall project first started to germinate," said in a statement Gilbert Rozon, founder of the Just for Laughs festival and commissioner for the city's 375th anniversary celebrations.

The Wall was released by Pink Floyd in 1979. 

The last time Roger Waters toured with The Wall Live between 2010-2013 it made almost $460 million USD.