It's almost half a century old, this music festival with the astonishing international reputation, performed yearly in the wonderfully unlikely venue of an honest-to-God small Irish town - Wexford. As the years pass, the Wexford Opera Festival becomes somehow more special, rather than less.

Since the 1950s, Dublin has attained a National Concert Hall, and Belfast has its own purpose-built concert hall. The Point accommodates the razzamatazz of big touring shows, ballet companies, and pop stars. But the name of Wexford has become as synonymous with opera as it has with strawberries: a town in which it is difficult to walk more than one abreast on the footpaths of its narrow streets.

This year, for the first time, I went to the Wexford Opera Festival. On the opera train. For the opening night. Flattened by flu, the colleague whose name was on all the tickets, and who had a party frock all ready in her bag, staggered home to bed on the afternoon of the night in question.

Someone's beady eye alighted upon my jean-clad, Doc Marten-shod self. Would I go instead to write the short piece required for the news desk? For every journalist in Doc Martens, the day of glamour eventually arrives, as it does for the understudy patiently crotcheting backstage until the night the heroine falls off the stage and has to be replaced.

There was considerably less than an hour until the 4.25 p.m. departure of the annual opera train from Pearse Street. Repeated over all the invitations was the mantra, formal dress. I abandoned my sandwich and took a taxi home. The glamour-gene was calling.

At Pearse Street, commuters toting briefcases, files, and bags of shopping fairly stared across the station. The specially-chartered opera train goes every year from Dublin to Wexford for the festival's opening night. Every man on this platform was wearing some creative version of a tuxedo. Every woman wore something black, or glittering, or both.

Luggage consisted of festival programmes, opera glasses, and tiny beaded handbags, no bigger than a handkerchief. Champagne was drunk. Tables with place settings, laid with white cloths awaited within the carriages. Everyone looked ecstatic. They waved their programmes and hummed tunes. The sun shone. Every journey should begin like this.

At Wexford, there were buses waiting to ferry us along the narrow streets to the theatre, which is itself a wonder. The opera festival is held in a building that looks like an artisan's cottage from the outside, and opens up inside like a trick, to transform into something lofty and magical: a cross between barn, church and theatre. The place was packed. I've never seen so many tuxedos in the flesh. The opening night opera was to be Fosca, by Brazil's best-known composer, Carlos Gomes. Five minutes after sitting down, when the overture had begun, it was clear that the real "colour story" of the night was not the opera train, or fashion extremes, or even the buzz and fun of the opening night, but birds.

The score or so starlings that had somehow found their ill-fated way into the theatre will be remembered for as long as the Wexford Opera Festival endures. They sat on the rafters far above our heads and tweeted away like a dawn chorus. They fluttered from rafter to rafter, some of them doing what birds do, causing several members of the well-dressed audience to shift uneasily in their seats for the duration of the opera.

The conductor, Alexander Anissimov, gamely acknowledged their presence after the overture by turning around and briefly conducting their choral input. The audience howled with delighted laughter. Throughout the opera, spontaneous giggles emanated from up and down the house, as the starlings let us know they were still there. It certainly demolished any preconceptions I had about opera-goers being deadly serious.

Despite the continual distraction, the singers and orchestra held Fosca together with a focused energy. The audience listened intently and clearly loved it, judging by the tumultuous applause at the end. One of the performers took his bouquet asunder and tossed white roses into the house. The birds tweeted on.

I know nothing about opera, but coming back on the magic-carpet train at midnight, I knew I had a fabulous night.

The Wexford Opera Festival continues until November 1st