Seeking adventure may mean looking for trouble, but how much trouble did you have in mind? Five years ago, when the Dallas Opera began planning its move to the luxurious new Winspear Opera House, the company’s artistic director, Jonathan Pell, approached the composer Jake Heggie to commission an opera for the inaugural season, with all the risks such a project entailed. Not missing a beat, Mr. Heggie told him, “I want to set ‘Moby-Dick.’ ”

Mr. Pell paused and asked, “Anything else?” At the literal level, Herman Melville’s great American novel is all about the sinking of a ship, shattered by a great white whale. On the level of metaphor, it depicts Promethean Man in revolt against the Almighty.

The idea was originally proposed by the playwright Terrence McNally, the librettist of Mr. Heggie’s first opera, the international hit “Dead Man Walking,” a death-row docudrama that had its premiere in San Francisco 10 years ago.

“I was taken totally by surprise,” Mr. Heggie, 49, said recently from Dallas, where the creative team and a high-powered cast were gathered for the final push to the premiere of “Moby-Dick,” held on April 30. “How bold! But shouldn’t opera be bold? ”

On reflection Mr. Pell recognized that there was no real alternative and brought in the San Francisco Opera, the San Diego Opera, Calgary Opera and State Opera of South Australia to share the commission. “We talked about other ideas,” he said. “But I could tell nothing else would inspire Jake in the same way.”

Inspire and terrify. By December 2008, counting down to a workshop in San Francisco that August, Mr. Heggie had thrown away 50 pages of music and kept 6 he thought he could use. The breakthrough came when he cracked Ahab’s first aria.

“When I write an opera, at a certain point the characters start singing to me,” Mr. Heggie said. “I never doubted that the music was there. Ahab is the trunk from which all the other branches grow. When I had the aria, I had found my musical world. I could go back to the beginning and write the two acts of the opera straight through, very quickly. ”

Mr. Heggie had to embark on his journey without Mr. McNally, who had lung cancer. But in the librettist Gene Scheer and the director Leonard Foglia he had other longtime, trusted partners.

For Mr. Scheer a major test was to capture the rugged Shakespearean music of the author’s voice.

“The characters are real people, and I wanted them to sound like real people of their time,” Mr. Scheer said. “Wherever I could use Melville’s language, I did. Probably 50 percent of the libretto is taken directly from the book. But the voice of the narrator is gone. That’s in the music.”

Listeners waiting for the famous opening line, “Call me Ishmael,” should not hold their breath. As T. Walter Herbert, president of the Melville Society, explained at a recent symposium on the opera, to appreciate the apocalyptic force of those words, we might imagine a contemporary American novel beginning “Call me Saddam.”

In the opera the character has suggestively been renamed Greenhorn. For the record, the word “greenhorn” occurs twice in the book as a common noun, applied to someone else.

Mr. Scheer has focused the action on four characters: from below deck, the footloose Greenhorn and the exotic first harpooner Queequeg, cannibal and peddler of human heads; from the officers’ quarters, Ahab and his stalwart first mate, Starbuck, a Quaker and a family man, who for a time manages to keep Ahab’s suicidal obsession with the whale in check.

Undulating figures on the first page of the score evoke Wagner’s proto-Minimalist water music in “Das Rheingold.” Clashing chords in a tempest call to mind thunder and lightning in Verdi’s “Otello.” What’s more, the Melville connection and the maritime element inevitably conjure up the Britten of “Billy Budd” and “Peter Grimes.” More startling, the traumatized keening of the cabin boy Pip - Melville’s Fool to his Ahab’s Lear - might hint at the boys’ choir in the opening of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion”: it floats above a grandly scaled musical structure .

The conductor Patrick Summers, having led the original productions of Mr. Heggie’s previous three fulllength operas, finds the broad range of affinities thoroughly compatible with an original voice. “ ‘Moby-Dick’ is grand opera,” Mr. Summers said, “and it honors that tradition.”


By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH


KAREN ALMOND/DALLAS OPERA
The conductor Patrick Summers at a rehearsal for ‘‘Moby-Dick’’ at the Winspear Opera House in Dallas.