BLOOMINGTON, Indiana– When composer Mason Bates contacted Michael Chabon to film his novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” in a opera, he said the writer told him frankly that “opera wasn’t his thing.”

“He was very supportive of the project and he gave it his blessing, but he said he couldn’t be involved,” Bates recalls. “He was definitely more supportive in terms of rights.”

So Bates and librettist Gene Scheer set out on their own to argue over giving lyrical form to Chabon’s sprawling, Pulitzer Prize winner the story of two young Jewish cousins ​​set over a decade before and after World War II.

Now, six years after Bates first read the novel and was inspired by it, the opera is bound for the Metropolitan Opera, set to open the company’s next season in September 2025.

But first, its world premiere will take place Friday in what might seem an unlikely location, at the Jacobs School of Music on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington. The premiere was originally scheduled at the Los Angeles Opera, but the company begged off, citing the costs involved.

Bloomington turns out to be an unsurprising choice given that the school has nearly 300 voice students and the Musical Arts Center, built in 1972, was modeled on the Met stage.

“The space, the technology and those kinds of production elements were very attractive to the Met in terms of how opera would be performed here,” said Catherine Compton, executive director of the opera theater program and ballet school.

“It has been heartwarming to see how our students have responded and been valued by the Met creative team who are in residence here,” she said. “And also how the creative team was able to adapt its approach to our students.”

In fact, Met staff will be back in Bloomington in January to work on another upcoming commission, an opera by Carlos Simon called “In the Rush” with a libretto by playwright Lynn Nottage and her daughter, Ruby Aiyo Gerber .

“Kavalier & Clay” was commissioned by the Met after Peter Gelb, the company’s chief executive, attended a performance of Bates’ first opera, “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs,” in 2017 in Santa Fe, New York. -Mexico.

Paul Cremo, the Met playwright, connected Bates with Scheer, a veteran librettist widely praised for his work in transforming Herman Melville’s cumbersome masterpiece, “Moby Dick,” into the text of a composed opera by Jake Heggie. The Met will perform this opera next March.

“I give ‘Moby Dick’ to new librettists to show them how to get to the point,” Cremo said. “‘Kavalier & Clay’ takes many side paths through the story and its nooks and crannies. I thought we needed someone who knew how to adapt and condense a book into an opera.

Once many “nooks and crannies” were removed, such as a 40-page detour to Antarctica, Scheer was able to focus on the two main characters.

There’s Joe Kavalier, who flees Czechoslovakia for America on the eve of the Holocaust, dreams of bringing his younger brother to safety in America, and falls in love with Rosa, a bohemian artist. His cousin is Sammy Clay, born in Brooklyn, who dreams of becoming rich and, ambivalent about his sexuality, has a thwarted love affair with a handsome actor.

Together, using Sammy’s storytelling talent and Joe’s artistic genius, the cousins ​​invent a wildly popular comic book character called The Escapist.

Scheer and Bates identified three distinct worlds depicted in the novel, each lending itself to a different style of composition.

“There’s the world of World War II, where we see the Kavalier family being picked off one by one,” Bates said. “It’s a very dark musical space with lots of drums and mandolins. Then the music of the New York big bands of the 1940s, a lot of swing, a lot of jazz. Then when they start drawing and creating art, we move into this electro-acoustic, techno-symphonic space.

Bates said he deliberately kept these sound worlds separate at first, but “what becomes really exciting about the opera is that as Joe goes through a sort of psychedelic spiral, these worlds start to collide and crash.”

Keeping these worlds visually separate and then merging them presented both a challenge and an opportunity for director Bart Sher, who worked on the set design with 59 Productions, a company known for its innovative use of projections and animation.

“The unique challenge of ‘Kavalier & Clay’ is the simultaneity of space and time,” Sher said. “You could see them working in the Empire Toys offices and at the same time see their family struggling in Prague, and at the same time see them trying to capture what that experience is like through The Escapist.

“And if you can make all three of those things work at the same time and have music and songs, then you really have something in this room that I think is very special.”