It was the final aria of Sappho, an opera written in 1963 by the late Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks, which was being performed as part of an Opera Australia gala festival in 2001 to mark the centenary of Australian federation.

Condon was then an aspiring musician and Kambala School student yet she was well aware of Sappho from helping out part-time in Opera Australia's library.

The opera had never been performed before and the nine minute-extract that Condon heard at the 2001 gala festival was the one and only time part of it was brought to life.

But it was enough to convince the determined and precocious Condon that Sappho was a project worth pursuing.

So, at the age of 17, Condon first contacted the estate which has looked after Glanville-Hicks' works since her death in 1990, and boldly asked for the rights to perform the opera.

Condon was politely refused and told to try again when she was older. She tried again the next year when she was a student at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, studying piano under concert pianist and leading Beethoven scholar Gerard Willems.

She was still too young to be given the rights to the masterpiece, which was the last grand opera that Glanville-Hicks wrote from her stone cottage on Mykonos. It was originally commissioned by the San Francisco Opera in 1963 with hopes that mezzo soprano Maria Callas would sing the title role.

But that never eventuated and the opera would remain only on paper for the next four decades.

"When you call at the age of 17 and ask for permission to hand over the rights for an opera, the final unperformed grand opera of a great composer, when the estate has been turning down requests from established companies for years and years you are likely to encounter a little bit of trouble, which I did," says Condon.

"They were terribly lovely and said to me: 'Would you like to call back when you've finished school?', which is fair enough."

It would take nine years of correspondence between Condon and the estate before the green light was granted.

The turning point came in 2008 when Condon gained employment as a souffleuse (prompt) at the world-renowned Hamburg State Opera under conductor Simone Young.

"I called excitedly home and told my parents that I had a job," she says. "I phoned the estate and said: 'I'm a real musician now may I please please [have the rights]' and they said: 'OK, let's talk'."

Condon, 29, who is permanently based in Hamburg, was back in Australia this month to meet with key people in the arts and festival community to discuss plans for a world premiere performance of Sappho (with libretto by Lawrence Durrell) in Australia.

"I'd like to bring Sappho home," she says. "For all her achievements abroad - and mine, for that matter - Peggy Glanville-Hicks was, as I am, proudly Australian.

"Peggy longed for a grand Australian performance of her masterpiece and wanted Sappho to open the Sydney Opera House. This was not to be and she died never hearing the work performed.

"I feel that the baton has been passed to me. I feel a responsibility to the work and to the composer."

Glanville-Hicks, not unlike Condon, had extraordinary tenacity in the pursuit of her goals.

"As a young composition student, she famously loitered for months on the pavement opposite Nadia Boulanger's house in Paris, bombarding her with notes requesting she be taken on as a student," reveals Condon.

"She was finally summoned to a lesson at 11pm. What a role model for me."

Plans for a performance come in the wake of Condon's successful recording of Sappho last November. Condon conducted the opera with an international cast including Wagnerian soprano Deborah Polaski in the title role and Sir John Tomlinson as her husband Kreon and the Gulbenkian Orchestra and Chorus.

Toccata Classics released the CD of the opera last November, in time for the centenary of Glanville-Hicks (1912-1990).

Condon first gained the rights from the estate to work on the Sappho score as part of a PhD through the University of New England.

Largely through the support of the late James Murdoch - Glanville-Hicks' biographer and co-executor of her estate - Condon was granted the rights to both the world premiere recording and the production of the opera.

"Opera belongs in a theatre on the stage with sets and costumes," she says.

"Although I have been working on the piece for more than a decade now and recording it was a huge milestone, so you can hear the music, it's not done until it's performed," she says.

So far, meetings with interested parties about staging the performance have been positive.

"I came back triumphal with the sentence I always wanted to hear: 'This is fantastic. Let's go for it'," says Condon.

Born in Wollongong, Condon attended The Illawarra Grammar School (TIGS) during her primary school years. She was frequently at the Wollongong Conservatorium of Music, for private music and theory lessons and piano exams.

From the age of 11, she was determined to be an opera conductor and went to Kambala School at Sydney's Rose Bay on a music scholarship for her high school years.

Condon was also an annual competitor at the City of Wollongong Eisteddfod in piano and vocal sections.

"I did Wollongong Eisteddfod from the age of six right through," she says. "It was the event.

"What I love about the Gong and the eisteddfod is that two days ago I was having lunch on North Beach with my family and I bumped into my piano duet partner from childhood, who is now a doctor living in Sydney.

"We both had a laugh about what it is that keeps drawing us back to this place."

Many of the people in Condon's life that she cites as hugely influential have Wollongong connections. Willems, Condon's teacher at the Sydney Con, lived in Wollongong during his teenage years and learnt piano from Janet Mathews.

Condon was a student of Nan Price and is part of a network of friends who were tutored by the highly-regarded piano teacher.

"How much talent that comes out of this area is quite astonishing," she says. "There are Wollongong people all over the place."

Condon has always had a dual love of music and vocals, which she says was cultivated during her early years at TIGS.

"The TIGS infants and primary school choirs had such a huge impact on me that I am still in touch with the teacher that ran the choral program at the school," she says.

"That teacher, Jane Lewis, is now living on a farm in Tasmania. She is a magical woman. She had a huge, huge impact on me.

"She also taught me how to be prepared. For a lot of what I do now I look back and realise that the beginnings of the learning process, to equip me to do something this huge, actually came from that time."

Condon recounts the story of being in Year 5 and desperately wanting the lead role in the school musical, knowing that traditionally the plum roles went to Year 6 students. And so, what did the irrepressible 10-year-old Condon do?

She went off and committed the entire show to memory before the auditions were called, making herself the strongest contender for the role.

"Even back then, all I knew was that I really wanted to do it," she says. "I had to think: 'If I really want it this much, then how do I go about it'? And Jane encouraged that."

During her undergraduate years, Condon studied operatic conducting with the late Vladimir Vais in Melbourne.

She continued studying operatic conducting in Vienna when she moved to Europe in 2005.

"I had just finished in Vienna, knowing I wanted a job as a prompt which is the closest thing you can get in an opera house to a conductor," she says. "For an entry position, it's the ideal one. Hamburg happened to need one. Normally walking into a job in Hamburg would be almost impossible for a beginner or someone straight out of uni because of the sheer quantity of material."

Condon's biggest challenge this year will be to see Sappho, set in ancient Greece, make its world premiere performance in Australia.

"We hope that sponsors and opera-lovers will give us the support we will need to bring this plan to fruition," she says.