The Metropolitan Opera just premiered its first opera composed by a woman in 116 years. Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin” is the first female-written opera to play at the Met since 1903, when the company did “Der Wald” by Ethel M. Smyth. “L’Amour de Loin” premiered on December 1 and will run through the holidays until December 29.

The production is one of six new productions in the Met’s 2016–2017 season. “L’Amour de Loin” is one of the most acclaimed pieces of the early 2000s. The opera takes place during the mid–12th century, during “the time of the historical Jaufré Rudel, a poet and troubadour.” the Met’s official synopsis reads. “It is set in the Aquitaine region of France, on the Mediterranean Sea, and in the Crusader state of Tripoli in what is now Lebanon. The personal journey that Rudel takes across the sea recalls the cultural journey of Western Europeans to the East in the time of the Crusades: it held a destructive aspect (war) but also a creative aspect (the fluorescence of the arts and learning itself in 12th-century Europe, which owed much to contact with the refined cultures of the eastern Mediterranean).”

“It’s a shock,” Saariaho told The New York Times of the 116 year gap. “It just shows how slowly these things evolve. But they are evolving — in all fields and also in music.”

The opera is conducted by Susanna Malkki in her Metropolitan debut and stars Susanna Phillips, Tamara Mumford, and Eric Owens.

“L’Amour de Loin” isn’t the only Saariaho opera hitting New York this year. In October, the New York Philharmonic put on her “Circle Map” at the Park Avenue Armory.